If everyone agrees with you, you are probably not innovating, you are conforming faster. History’s real breakthroughs did not come from consensus but from heretics, hackers, and the endlessly curious. In this talk, Michael Carducci challenges the myth of collective wisdom and explains why the crowd is almost always optimized for the past. Through stories of unconventional thinkers, from computing pioneers to magicians who redefined wonder, he reveals the recurring patterns behind genuine innovation: discomfort, doubt, and persistence in the face of disbelief.

Attendees will learn how to identify the hidden forces that suppress new ideas, trust intuition even when it runs against consensus, and nurture the curiosity and courage that fuel meaningful change. This session is a call to those who question norms and experiment at the edges, the place where all real progress begins.

What You Will Learn

• Why consensus often inhibits innovation and creativity
• How to recognize and resist social and organizational forces that suppress new ideas
• Practical ways to cultivate curiosity, intuition, and courage in your work

Who Should Attend

Developers, innovators, leaders, and creators who challenge convention and seek to build ideas that move technology, and people, forward.

Tests are code, too, but they don't get as much attention, often leaving messy, hard to understand tests. Poorly factored tests can also make refactoring production code more difficult, resulting in even messier code.

In this session, we'll start with what we need from a good test, using AssertJ and JUnit features to make it readable and maintainable. We'll walk up the ladder from Helper methods, shared Factory Methods, all the way to Test Data Builders, discussing how and when to make the transition between them. We'll look at test "smells" and how to repair them, using Parameterized Tests. If time allows, we'll see how to "retarget" your tests when extracting a new production class from existing code.

While the code is in Java, the principles and techniques apply to most languages.

Augmented Coding is more than just asking an AI to help you write code.

You externalize your decision points, heuristics, and workflows into artifacts the agent can follow. The agent becomes your mentee.

As you do that, you change your focus from low-level details to high-level intent and methodology. Decisions that were unconscious become explicit.

In this talk, I’ll share my story of how I learned to teach AI a Software Crafter’s approach to development.

The agent follows a rigorous TDD process with 121 unique nodes and 131 directed edges that can run autonomously for hours, creating dozens of commits.

It covers advanced context engineering and techniques to increase autonomy while aiming to maintain quality.

And I will tell real stories of AI-enabled breakthroughs in real-world product development.

Developers find themselves in a world where old maps no longer apply. The rules of software development have fundamentally shifted, and continue shifting at unprecedented speeds.

Drawing from a year of exploration, this talk reveals where AI truly shines - from rapid prototyping to uncovering what we didn't know we didn't know - and hidden dangers that can erode the very trust our software depends on.

Come discover the patterns emerging from this new reality: when to explore freely, when to be careful, and what opens up when the old constraints disappear.