SAVE THE DATE! CODECON #Žilina
CODECON #Žilina brings together the tech community, IT professionals, and local companies in one place. Expect exciting tech topics, real-world insights, and plenty of opportunities to connect with people tackling challenges just like yours.
See you on November 26, 2026, at the New Synagogue! Come gain fresh insights, meet people from the IT community, and experience CODECON in a more intimate atmosphere.
Meet the speakers of CODECON #Žilina 2026
Panel Discussion: Vibe Coding and the Limits of AI-Generated Code
I've been building software for 30 years. A lot of people know me from the agile world, but for the past few years I've spent most of my time working with AI agents.
At ScrumDesk, I built an agentic pipeline that now powers how we ship our products: tools for project management, strategy planning, and business flow analysis and management. The pipeline covers the whole process, from preparing requirements through design and prioritization to code, tests, documentation, and production deployment. The agent itself gets a task done in anywhere from a few minutes to a few dozen. I keep developing this approach under the name ADLC (Agentic Development Life Cycle).
I'm also interested in what AI does to teams. When an agent writes code faster than anyone can spec it, who does what on the team changes, and so does the bottleneck. I also like to talk openly about which parts of the agentic hype don't work.
Panel Discussion: What separates great developers from the average?
Years of experience, lines of code written, or simply delivering quickly don’t automatically make someone a great developer. Experienced senior engineers and managers will openly discuss what really sets top developers apart in practice: asking the right questions, understanding the business, communicating effectively, knowing when to say “no,” and choosing simple solutions over unnecessary complexity.
Industrial AI Cloud – Infrastructure That Moves Europe Forward
I'm an IT professional with 20 years of experience and a self-confessed tech nerd since an early age.
I love exploring new technologies, pushing boundaries, and turning my managers' ambitious ideas into practical solutions for customers. These days, my main focus is building infrastructure for AI.
Three Prompts for Cinderella: And Who Checks Her Code?
I'm an engineer at Slido (Cisco) who loves all things visual, and these days I spend way too much time with AI agents. I'm endlessly fascinated by how engineering has changed more in the past few weeks than in the previous three decades. I can solve a Rubik's cube and cook the perfect tonkatsu.
Program CODECON #Žilina 2026
Check in and soak up the vibe. You can arrive at CODECON anytime during the conference day. Just have your online ticket ready.
Read moreThe program runs across three stages: TITANS STAGE (main stage on the ground floor of Nová synagóga), Café STAGE (the café inside Nová synagóga), and Siemens Healthineers STAGE Bábkové divadlo (Puppet Theater).
Read moreWhat if GenAI could go beyond chat and dynamically adapt an app to the user’s data and goals? This talk explores practical approaches to GenAI in medical apps.
From presenting data, insights, and results to dynamic UI, and where to draw the line between AI-generated and deterministic behavior.
Years of experience, lines of code written, or simply delivering quickly don’t automatically make someone a great developer. Experienced senior engineers and managers will openly discuss what really sets top developers apart in practice: asking the right questions, understanding the business, communicating effectively, knowing when to say “no,” and choosing simple solutions over unnecessary complexity.
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Accountants have done event sourcing for 500 years, unknowingly.
How to be fast and auditable?
Why a modular monolith, not microservices?
How to keep other tenants' data from AI? (Not via prompt…)
Why isn't MCP a REST API?
How to orchestrate AI agents without losing control?
How to give the user the final say?
In practice: CQRS, DDD, event-driven.
Behind every AI solution that works in practice is powerful infrastructure. Industrial AI Cloud, a joint project by Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA with nearly 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, is already up and running in Munich. This innovative platform enables companies to train and run AI models and simulate production. It also gives Slovak DevOps engineers and technical specialists the chance to work with cutting-edge technology and help shape the future, right from Košice. You’ll learn about the AI infrastructure already in place at the Munich data centre, along with plans for expanding its capacity and why that matters for Europe. Miroslav Janoušek, an architect at Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia, will take you behind the scenes.
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Think you know your way around tech? Then game on! Siemens Mobility is bringing an interactive quiz show to CODECON, where you’ll go head-to-head with other attendees, put your tech and general knowledge to the test, and maybe even learn something new. Expect fun questions, a competitive vibe, and great prizes for the top players. Ready to play?
Read moreI want to help the audience: organize their time, grow personally, change their perception of leadership, become more resilient and leave with specific approaches they can immediately test in their own practice.
Key takeaways: Self-improvement, Authenticity, Trust and integrity, Frustration management, Ownership, Holistic approach, Task delegation
AI can generate a working app in just a few hours. The question is what happens six months later, when something needs to be changed in the code and no one really knows how it works.
In this discussion, we want to explore where productive “vibe coding” ends and invisible technical debt begins—and how to put the right practices in place, from code reviews and testing to documentation, for code that was largely written by AI.
Starting out in IT is harder today than ever before. AI is reshaping development every month, there are so many technologies you don't know where to begin, expectations are high, and comparing yourself to others has never been easier. If any of this sounds familiar, this talk is for you. I'll share what I struggled with and the problems juniors run into most often. Using real examples, I'll show you the habits, mindsets and communication skills that helped me survive my first years and keep growing.
You'll walk away with realistic expectations (without idealism or cynicism), practical tips and, I hope, the encouragement that you're not in this alone.
Even the best idea is worthless if it gets lost on its way to the audience. Yet when presenting, we often make the same mistakes: too much data, overly complicated language, unclear structure, a weak opening, or a key message that gets lost somewhere between the slides.
We’ll explore how to debug your presentation so that people understand your message, remember it, and ideally, believe in it too.
You’ll walk away with practical tips you can apply to your next demo, meeting, pitch, or even on the big stage.
Does manual penetration testing still make sense in the age of AI? How does AI help with cybersecurity? Where does it work well, and where does it fall short? How can attackers use AI? Let’s explore these questions together.
How AI is changing and has already changed cybersecurity
AI: a good servant, but a bad master
AI tools in penetration testing
How I use AI in my work
Is it
Most people try to be reasonable with AI. I don't. If you can imagine it, it should at least try to exist. A PowerPoint deck? How about one the audience controls, live, in everything? Will it work? We'll see.
Meanwhile, we generate more code than anyone could write in a lifetime. So who checks it? Should anyone? And other wild topics.
A crypto payment platform: an ATM network, a payment gateway, and POS terminals. Multiple Kubernetes clusters, plus VMs, Proxmox, and network infrastructure. Every layer had its own monitoring, and none of them could answer the question: what's happening with this payment right now? On top of that, DORA and MiCA, which don't want a dashboard. They want a provable ability to reconstruct an incident after the fact.
Here's how we turned all that into one central stack: Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana, with the OpenTelemetry Collector as the transport layer. VMs and network devices feed into the same pipeline via exporters and SNMP. Wazuh SIEM and immutable logs sit right next to the telemetry instead of in a parallel system. The whole stack is versioned through GitOps.
To wrap up, lessons learned: what we'd build differently today.
Loading rules doesn’t mean enforcing them. Learn to write rules that matter and check whether the generated code follows them. We’ll cover conflicts in AGENTS.md, context limits, and how hooks, agent loops, and software factories help verify the result.
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Time to grab a proper hot meal. We recommend planning your lunch ahead, whether that’s booking a table at a restaurant or ordering through Wolt, Bolt Food, Bistro.sk, or another delivery service. Since CODECON is free to attend, food isn’t provided for attendees.
Read moreAI Battle is a live coding competition where contestants go head-to-head solving programming challenges with modern AI coding agents. The goal isn’t to write code by hand. It’s to work effectively with AI tools and show how they can speed up solving real-world problems.
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Main topics of the talk:
1. Why customers leave even technically solid products
2. The difference between using a product and actually gaining value from it
3. The most common gaps between the developer’s and the customer’s perspective
4. What customer data and feedback can tell us
5. Practical ways to reduce churn and support product adoption
The goal of the talk is to show developers how to better understand their customers and how this understanding can help them build products that users not only start using, but also stay with.
The same code review comments, over and over? I’ll show how AI agents analyze reviews and propose rules for future development. We’ll follow the process from a pull request comment to a proposed rule and the decision to accept or discard it. Concrete examples will show what worked for us and where we hit limits.
The talk will show how to reduce token usage when working with coding agents and applications powered by LLMs—from system prompts and context management to different settings and parameters, code mode, and specific tools such as Headroom. Participants will learn where the savings come from, how they work, and how to apply them in their own workflows. Fewer tokens mean lower costs, faster responses, and more efficient development.
Outline:
System — The environment, model, and harness; how they work together and affect token usage.
Settings — Model selection, prefix caching, code-mode, and the system prompt.
Compression — Core principles, modern tools, and context optimization.
Headroom — How it works, setup, benefits, and scaling.
For years, I tested and implemented tests using black box techniques. Static analysis and white box testing were too time-consuming. With AI, not anymore. I “asked” a 30-year-old repository how its undocumented features work and why a bug occurred with an unreadable error message. I’ll show what worked, what didn’t, and what it means for shift left.
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In a production Phoenix application, we opened nearly 3,800 pull requests in a year, peaking at 470 in a single month. How do you keep track of them all without relying on people to catch issues that tools can already detect?
Does a team lead have to stop being an engineer? No, but moving from developer to team lead means finding a new balance between people, technology, and responsibility. Drawing on my own path from junior to senior, architect, and now lead of a nine-person team, I’ll share my 60:40 model for leading people while staying technically relevant. I’ll cover 1:1s, feedback, and delegation, and how to remain the team’s technical backbone without micromanaging or taking over their work. I’ll also show how I split my time between leadership and technical work, and how I use lessons from production and architecture to set the team’s technical direction.
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The best SDKs are the ones developers don't even notice. Discover how development differs from apps and how to spot the good ones. What makes devs love or curse them?
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This lecture is a guide to the world of hexspeak - from magic numbers to poison values to crash codes. You'll leave with why uninitialized memory is embarrassing as soon as you boot it, what "bad coffee, odd food" means in a crashing kernel, and how to sneak your own word into 32 bits. No prerequisites - just know that 9 is followed by A.
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You have agents. You have MCP. And you still get generic answers — because the context is missing. In most companies everyone builds their own: md files in a repo, RAG, vectors, Obsidian. But what if everyone had all of it? A context engine isn’t one box that solves this on its own. I’ll show what we actually tried: off-the-shelf open-source solutions vs. our own, Qdrant as a vector database, and sharing context between agents in Multica. And that development, support and business each need something different — including what didn’t work for us.
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“How are you?” - “Fine.” The project? Fine. Anything from me? Probably nothing. Great, we’re efficient...
A 1:1 shouldn’t be a status meeting. It’s time we dedicate to one person - their growth, their challenges, and where they want to go. For me, it’s one of the most valuable investments a leader can make, and at the same time, it’s a space where trust is built, where we catch problems before they turn into crises, and where we help people navigate change.
I’ll show you how to turn 1:1s into a development system, what kinds of questions bring real issues to light, and why sometimes it’s best just to listen.
You’ll walk away with principles and questions you can use in your very next 1:1.
Wonder what happens in the browser when your JavaScript runs? We’ll go beyond the Event Loop to explore Task & Microtask queues, memory Heap, Garbage Collection, and background framework magic. Finally, we'll dive into Closures, functional programming, and Event Bubbling.
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A practical look at running local LLMs for software development and customer projects. We'll explore real-world performance, hardware requirements, production readiness, and limitations, including a comparison of Qwen, Gemma, and Mistral models with a focus on Slovak language capabilities.
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Just a few years ago, I thought I’d be a programmer for the rest of my life.
Today, AI writes a growing share of the code, and the job market seems to be heading in a direction where companies may rather buy an AI agent than hire a programmer. Maybe soon it won’t matter as much what you know, but whether anyone even knows you exist.
This isn’t going to be a talk about becoming an influencer or a guide to cracking the LinkedIn algorithm. It’s a story about the journey of an introvert who moved to the Orava region and somehow found a way to stay involved with the community for the past fifteen years.
What you’ll take away:
- why personal branding matters in the age of AI,
- what actually works when you’re an introvert, don’t live in Bratislava, and aren’t good at marketing,
- why stepping outside your comfort zone matters and why sometimes all you need to do is reach out.
CODECON RETURNS TO THE NEW SYNAGOGUE
This year, we’re meeting again at the New Synagogue – a venue whose remarkable architecture and cultural heritage give the conference a truly unique atmosphere.
On November 26, 2026, technology, IT professionals, and the local community will come together here once again. And it’s this special setting that gives CODECON #Žilina its own distinctive character.
Partnership
We regret seeing talented Slovaks leave the country. Let’s support the developer and IT community in the region together. Let’s create synergies, new opportunities, and exciting projects—and push technology forward as a community. Join the CODECON community today!
What People Are Saying About Us
Program Committee
Our mission is to deliver top-notch, engaging content on topics that truly resonate with our community.
To ensure an exceptional experience, we have assembled a strong Program Committee responsible for selecting the best content and ensuring that only the most inspiring and cutting-edge topics make it to the conference.
GET INTO THE CODECON SPIRIT
While we're preparing the next edition of CODECON #Žilina, why not revisit the previous ones? On our YouTube channel, you'll find talks packed with practical insights, tech topics, and tips from people who work in IT every day.
Check them out and get inspired!
