Devdays - Unstacked Engineering Conference

02/06/2026

Tools change quickly, and the landscape keeps shifting.
But principles tend to move more slowly.

When learning is anchored only in what is new, it becomes harder to decide what deserves attention and what can be left aside. Patterns and mental models provide that anchor. They help you evaluate novelty instead of simply adopting it.

devdays focuses on those deeper layers of understanding, the ones that remain useful even as stacks evolve.

With that perspective, change feels less overwhelming and easier to navigate.

Think in systems. Build to last.
https://www.devdays.ro/

28/05/2026

Most engineering content teaches you how to use tools. Less of it helps you think about why systems end up the way they do. Understanding the context behind decisions that made sense at the time and didn't age well matters.

That gap stayed with us long enough that we ended up writing something about it.

The devdays manifesto is our attempt to articulate what we think matters in software engineering today. The thinking behind patterns and practices, and why learning should reflect the real challenges we face in our projects.

If that sounds like your kind of conversation, devdays is probably your kind of conference.

Read it here: https://www.devdays.ro/manifesto

26/05/2026

“AI doesn’t work for me.”

Many engineers still feel that way after trying AI coding tools.

Sometimes the results are inconsistent. Sometimes the generated code creates more work later. Sometimes the workflow simply never clicks in a way that feels useful inside real projects.

This 2-day workshop with Gerald Versluis is here to change that.

You’ll work directly inside real codebases and engineering scenarios, exploring prompting techniques, coding agents, GitHub Copilot, MCP servers, and AI-assisted workflows beyond demos and autocomplete.

The focus is on understanding how to use these tools to streamline your day-to-day engineering work.

And by the end of the workshop, the goal is simple: go from “AI doesn’t work for me” to shipping software with AI as your co-pilot.

Skeptics especially welcome.

Workshop: AI-Powered Development: From Skeptic to Shipping
21–22 September · Iași, Romania

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

21/05/2026

21/05/2026

devdays workshops are open for registration 👇

Join Vlad Khononov for the 2-day Hands On Balanced Coupling workshop and learn how modular design becomes a competitive advantage in the age of AI-assisted software engineering, using the Balanced Coupling model to build systems that can evolve without collapsing into complexity.

Join Gerald Versluis for the 2-day AI-Powered Development: From Skeptic to Shipping workshop and explore how AI fits into real engineering workflows, from prompting and coding agents to shipping software.

Join Marcin Samsonowski for the 1-day Software Design as Code - from Concepts to AI-driven Automation workshop and learn how to treat software design as code: versioned, automated, and integrated into the development lifecycle.

Workshop groups are intentionally limited to keep the sessions hands-on and interactive.

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

19/05/2026

It’s difficult to understand a system when you only look at it in fragments.

A one-hour talk can surface patterns, highlight trade-offs, and shift perspective. But some things only become clear when you stay with them longer and follow them through decisions, constraints, and the small details that don’t always fit into a slide.

That’s why devdays begins with two days of workshops.

Workshops create space for depth. For working through real scenarios, asking questions, and seeing how ideas hold up once applied in practice. They allow understanding to build gradually, instead of appearing all at once as insight.

By the time the conference begins, you’re no longer approaching topics from the outside. You’ve already spent time inside the system.

That changes how you listen, and what you notice.

https://www.devdays.ro/

14/05/2026

Meet Vlad Khononov, author and software architect.

Vlad focuses on making sense of complex domains, untangling systems that have grown over time, and helping teams understand how structure and decisions shape what a system becomes.

Over the years, he’s worked across different roles, from hands-on engineering to architecture, always close to systems that had to evolve under real constraints.

His work focuses on understanding how systems behave and how to design them so they can evolve without becoming fragile.

Some of you might know his work through his books Learning Domain-Driven Design and Balancing Coupling in Software Design.

He was on our stage a few years ago, and returns this year with a new perspective on how systems grow and where they become difficult to change.

Talk: AI — The Golden Age of Modularity (or Why Robots Hate Big Balls of Mud)
Workshop: Hands On Balanced Coupling

→ https://www.devdays.ro/

12/05/2026

Meet Gerald Versluis, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft.

Gerald has spent years building across the .NET ecosystem, from frontend to backend and everything in between.

Over time, his work has moved through different layers of the stack: mobile, cloud, APIs, and tooling. This path opened his perspective to see beyond technologies to how decisions made in one place surface elsewhere later.

More recently, his day-to-day work has been shaped by the same shift many teams are still figuring out: how AI fits into real engineering workflows.

Inside actual projects, not demos or in isolation.

He has seen where it helps, where it slows things down, where it introduces uncertainty or risks that you only notice after a while, and what the costs are when you're not paying attention.

He’s also been an active part of the developer community for years, sharing what he learns along the way through writing, talks, and open conversations with other engineers.

Some of you might remember him from previous editions. He comes back this year with a perspective shaped by how the work itself has changed.

Talk: I’m a Software Engineer at Microsoft. I Don’t Write Code.
Workshop: AI-Powered Development: From Skeptic to Shipping

→ https://www.devdays.ro/

06/05/2026

Regular tickets are now available.

If you’ve been waiting to see who’s joining this year before deciding, this is the moment.

The program is starting to take shape, and we’ll continue announcing speakers, talks, and workshops in the coming weeks.

→ https://www.devdays.ro/

05/05/2026

devdays conversations this year will be shaped by:

Vlad Khononov - Author & Software Architect
Alin Simion - Senior Cloud Engineer @ CrowdStrike
Gerald Versluis - Senior Software Engineer @ Microsoft
Steven Hillaert - Coaching Software Engineers @ AllPhi
Christian Horsdal - Consultant & Author
Mihaela Gheorghe-Roman - Experienced Software Architect @ Systematic
Marcin Samsonowski - Enterprise Architect & International Speaker
Erwin Staal - Solution Architect, Author & Microsoft MVP

More speakers will follow as we shape the full program.

The decisions we make as engineers can show up in different places, often long after they're made. You don’t always see the impact right away, but it surfaces later, somewhere else in the system.

The speakers joining devdays this year are those who’ve had to work through that in real environments and are now ready to share their experience.

Their talks touch on things many teams are already dealing with: AI becoming part of daily work, architectural decisions that only prove themselves over time, security issues that appear in unexpected places, and design choices that sometimes age once they hit production.

→ https://www.devdays.ro/