Raptors Conference 2026 — Production-Grade Lessons from the Real World

Raptors Conference 2026 was broadcast online on October 21 and 22, 2026. It was the first edition: a free conference of talks from engineers who run production at scale, on the failures they learned from, the systems they scaled and the tradeoffs they would defend. The theme was production-grade lessons from the real world.

✯ The Programme

44 talks were chosen from an open call for papers, which closed on August 28, 2026. Every submission was scored against a written rubric and selected on merit. Any stack was welcome, from frontend and backend to DevOps, ML, data and security, as long as the talk carried a real production lesson. Submitting was free and attending was free.

The talks ran as one programme in nine blocks:

• It broke in production — 8 talks.
• Under load — 4 talks.
• The migration you live with — 4 talks.
• Data as a system — 4 talks.
• Shipping AI for real — 4 talks.
• When AI can't be trusted — 5 talks.
• Assume breach — 4 talks.
• Craft and the horizon — 6 talks.
• Open track — 5 talks.

✯ Highlights

Speakers came from engineering teams at Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, DoorDash, Target, Costco Wholesale, Yahoo, AT&T and Sam's Club Tech, among others. A few of the talks:

• Cache Invalidation Is Easy. It's the Refill That Takes You Down — a senior software engineer at Microsoft.
• The AI Velocity Paradox — how GenAI exposes the delivery debt your DORA metrics have been hiding, from a senior engineering manager at Target.
• The Honest Service Mesh Adoption Framework — an engineering lead at JPMorgan Chase.
• The Hard Parts of SQL Translation — lessons from building cross-engine compatibility at scale, from DoorDash.
• Migrating a Billion-Document Corpus with Zero Downtime and Continuous Reconciliation.
• Engineering Gamification at Scale — production lessons from building streaks and XP for 21 million users.
• Don't Just Test It, Prove It — verifying AI-written Rust.

✯ Replay and Proceedings

Every talk is archived. The full replay and the timetable are at proceedings.raptors.dev/replay.

Selected talks are also published as papers. Proceedings of the Raptors Conference, Volume 1, is at proceedings.raptors.dev, and each paper has a Crossref DOI, so the work can be cited.

The speakers and all 44 talks are listed at raptors.dev/conference.