About two weeks ago, I landed in Amsterdam for the first time. Not just to visit, though the city deserved every extra day I gave it, but to attend DevWorld Conference 2026. Two full days of talks, hallway conversations, and the kind of energy you only get when you put a few hundred developers who genuinely care about their craft in the same space.

This is my honest recap.

First impressions

I had followed DevWorld online for a while. Watching talks on YouTube, seeing posts from attendees, always telling myself "next year." This time I actually went.

The first thing I noticed was the atmosphere. It wasn't overwhelming or corporate. It felt like a place where people came to actually talk about engineering.

The one thing that became clear across two days

AI is no longer experimental. It's becoming foundational to how software gets built.

That thread ran through almost every session, whether the speaker addressed it directly or not. Engineers on stage were showing working systems, real architectural decisions, actual failure modes, not slides about what AI might do someday.

The sessions worth talking about

Two days, a lot of talks. Here's what stayed with me.

On the security side, the clearest message was that "find and fix later" doesn't scale when code is being generated at machine speed. AI-accelerated development needs security built in from the start, not the same old model applied faster. That same theme extended to authorization, one talk made the case that fragmented auth logic spread across services, gateways, and AI agents doesn't just create security gaps, it creates cascading failures that look like unexplainable bugs. That reframe stuck with me.

On architecture and tooling, there were good sessions on avoiding rewrites, fighting framework lock-in, and managing long-lived codebases without burning everything down. One talk asked the questions most people are still avoiding: how do you debug non-deterministic code? What is the developer's actual role when part of the system is AI-generated?

The frontend track was honest in a way I appreciated. One session traced the full history of signals from KnockoutJS to SolidJS to the TC39 proposal, as someone who works with Angular signals daily, the historical context of why this primitive keeps being reinvented was genuinely clarifying. Another looked at what AI-written frontends actually look like after six months: flawless boilerplate, solid tests, and a shaky architecture nobody fully understands. The conclusion wasn't "AI is bad." It was that humans need to guard architecture, state management, and design system coherence while AI handles the repetitive parts. A practical and honest division of labor.

There were also sessions on multi-agent patterns (a live D&D campaign built on stage with coordinated agents, chaotic in the best way), documentation as a living product, zero-trust security from browser policies down to distroless containers, and deep dives into loading performance and HTTP client internals.

But honestly, it was the people

The sessions were great. But what I'll carry with me longest is the conversations that happened outside of them.

There's something special about meeting developers who genuinely love what they do. The kind of people you can talk architecture, performance, protocols, or frontend reactivity with for minutes straight in a hallway without either of you checking your phone. In a time where AI tools are everywhere and vibe coding is becoming normal, that kind of conversation is worth traveling for.

I met people building interesting things. I saw startups solving real problems. I exchanged ideas with engineers from very different backgrounds, and came away with a clearer sense of where things are heading.

What I'm bringing home

Three things cut across everything I heard and discussed.

AI has moved from feature to infrastructure. The best builders are treating it that way, not as a shortcut, but as something that changes architecture decisions, security models, and what it means to write software professionally.

Final thought

My first DevWorld. Not my last.

If you're debating whether to go to a conference when everything is available online, go. The content you can get later. The conversations you can't.

Thank you Amsterdam 💖. Already thinking about next year.