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The World’s Largest Event for Developers, AI Builders & Tech Leaders

September 23–25, 2026San José, CA

  • 10,000+
    Builders
  • 4,000+
    Companies
  • 2,000+
    Decision-makers
  • 500+
    Speakers
  • 20+
    Stages
  • 200k+
    sq ft Tech Expo
September 23–25, 2026 · San José

Speakers

500+ Speakers. In One Place.

Why Attend.

AI is already inside the development workflow. The hard questions are still open: how to build, what to automate, what to trust, what to secure, what to buy, how to operate it in production. WeAreDevelopers World Congress is where developers, platform teams, security teams, and engineering leaders discuss what actually works.

Developers at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress main stage.
  • 01

    Learn what's actually working in production

    Talks from people building and operating real systems: AI-assisted development, agents, cloud platforms, observability, data pipelines, security, developer tools, and delivery workflows. What broke, what scaled, and what teams would not do again.

    You leave withpatterns to copy, mistakes to avoid, and a sharper view of what is production-ready.
  • 02

    Get hands-on with tools and patterns

    Workshops, masterclasses, and live coding sessions where you actually try the tools, break things, and understand the details. Not just slides. Not just inspiration. Practical sessions you can bring back to your own codebase and workflows.

    You leave withmuscle memory, working examples, and techniques your team can adapt immediately.
  • 03

    Get AI-ready as an engineer

    Traditional engineering practices are changing fast: coding assistants, agents, evals, context engineering, AI-assisted testing, security reviews, and new delivery patterns are becoming part of how modern teams build software. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the workflow. The question is how to use it well without lowering quality, security, or engineering judgment.

    You leave witha practical AI workflow, a clearer sense of where AI helps or hurts, and more confidence using it in real engineering work.
  • 04

    Build the skills that keep you relevant

    The strongest developers are not just learning another framework. They understand systems, trade-offs, security, reliability, AI-assisted delivery, developer experience, and how to make better technical decisions. Use the event to learn which skills are becoming more valuable, which habits are becoming outdated, and where to invest your learning time next.

    You leave withclearer skill priorities, stronger technical judgment, and a better view of where your career should move next.
  • 05

    Compare architectures, tools, and trade-offs

    Use the event to test your assumptions before the next platform or tooling decision. Open source vs managed service. Build vs buy. Central platform vs team-level tooling. Agent workflows vs classic automation. Vendor claims vs practitioner reality.

    You leave witha shortlist, real trade-offs, and fewer decisions made from hype or incomplete information.
  • 06

    Benchmark your AI, engineering, and security practices

    Find out how other teams are handling the decisions you are making now: AI coding policies, agent governance, security reviews, platform ownership, observability, cloud cost, compliance, and developer productivity. Not best-practice theory, but what teams are actually shipping.

    You leave witha reality check on where you are ahead, behind, or solving the wrong problem.
  • 07

    Bring your team and align faster

    Use the event as a three-day engineering offsite. Split across tracks, compare notes over coffee, challenge assumptions, and turn scattered opinions into a shared direction. This is especially useful when your team is making decisions around AI adoption, platform architecture, security rules, developer productivity, or tooling.

    You leave witha shared mental model, clearer priorities, and fewer decisions re-litigated in the next sprint.
  • 08

    Meet the builders behind the tools you use

    Maintainers, founders, CTOs, SREs, security leaders, and product teams from the tools your company already uses are in the same place. Ask the questions that do not fit into documentation, GitHub issues, sales calls, or webinar Q&A.

    You leave withdirect answers, better context, and contacts you can still reach after the event.
  • 09

    Understand where the stack is going

    Agents, evals, MCP, AI-assisted coding, platform engineering, cloud-native infrastructure, observability, and security are moving fast. The point is not to chase every trend. The point is to know what is real, what is early, and what is not worth your time yet.

    You leave witha clearer view of what to adopt, what to watch, and what to ignore.
  • 10

    Get unstuck on problems you are solving now

    Every developer has questions that are hard to answer from documentation, blog posts, vendor pages, or internal Slack threads. At the event, you can bring those questions into talks, workshops, hallway conversations, and Q&A sessions with people who have solved similar problems before.

    You leave withbetter answers, better questions, and practical next steps for the work waiting back at your desk.

On-site

Three Days, Many Ways to Spend Them.

  • Audience listening to a keynote on the WeAreDevelopers main stage.

    Inspiration

  • Speaker presenting a tech talk to a packed room.

    Tech Talks

  • Dan Abramov live-coding on stage at WeAreDevelopers.

    Live Coding

  • Attendees collaborating during a hands-on workshop session.

    Workshops

  • JetBrains booth on the WeAreDevelopers expo floor.

    Tech Expo

  • Happy winner celebrating a Code100 coding challenge victory.

    Challenges

  • Attendees networking and socialising between sessions.

    Community

  • Crowd at the WeAreDevelopers after-show with stage lights overhead.

    Music & Vibes

Topics in focus

What You Will Learn.

AI is no longer a side topic. It is changing how teams design, code, test, ship, secure, operate, and lead software. The conference program covers the full modern software lifecycle - from everyday engineering craft to agentic systems, platforms, security, quality, and engineering leadership.

  1. Build
  2. Ship
  3. Run
  4. Secure
  5. Test
  6. Lead
  1. 01

    Building with AI as a craft

    • Backend engineers
    • Frontend engineers
    • ML engineers
    • Full-stack builders

    What we cover

    • Coding agents in your IDE: what to delegate, what to keep.
    • Architecture decisions that compound when AI writes code alongside you.
    • Prompt design and context engineering as real engineering disciplines.
    • Retrieval, latency, and shipping software that survives users.
    • Evals and feedback loops you can actually trust against real traffic.
    • Refactoring legacy code with agents — what works, what blows up.
  2. 02

    Agentic systems in production

    • ML engineers
    • Backend engineers
    • Platform engineers
    • AI engineers
    • Tech leads

    What we cover

    • Multi-agent architectures, MCP, and tool orchestration patterns that hold up.
    • Agent memory, long-running agents, and what breaks after six months in front of users.
    • Guardrails, fallbacks, and the boring plumbing that keeps agents from going sideways.
    • Cost, latency, and throughput trade-offs once agents are on the critical path.
    • Honest post-mortems from teams who shipped agentic systems.
  3. 03

    Modern languages and runtimes

    • Backend engineers
    • Systems engineers
    • Full-stack builders
    • Tech leads

    What we cover

    • Rust, Go, modern Java, Kotlin, and TypeScript at scale.
    • WebAssembly moving from edge experiment to mainstream runtime.
    • Architectural calls that compound when AI agents start writing code too.
    • Interop, FFI, and polyglot stacks when no single language wins anymore.
    • Performance tuning, memory models, and concurrency in real production code.
  4. 04

    Platforms, pipelines and developer experience

    • Platform engineers
    • DevOps
    • SRE
    • Frontend engineers
    • Engineering managers
    • Tech leads

    What we cover

    • Internal developer platforms treated as products, with golden paths that people actually use.
    • CI/CD that does not flake, and release flows when AI agents open PRs alongside humans.
    • Self-service infra and paved roads that scale across dozens of teams.
    • Build times, caching, and the small wins that change how engineers feel about your platform.
    • Developer experience as a measurable outcome, not a vibe.
  5. 05

    Cloud, scale and reliability

    • Backend engineers
    • Cloud engineers
    • SRE
    • DevOps
    • Frontend engineers
    • Platform engineers

    What we cover

    • Capacity planning, multi-region deployment, and observability that answers questions.
    • GPU-heavy workloads next to classic services, and nondeterministic latency on call.
    • SLOs and agent telemetry when half your critical path is a model you do not own.
    • Incident response and on-call in a stack that mixes deterministic and probabilistic systems.
    • Cost, capacity, and the reliability trade-offs of running models in production.
  6. 06

    Data, analytics and the AI training stack

    • Data engineers
    • ML engineers
    • Analytics engineers
    • Backend engineers
    • Platform teams

    What we cover

    • Pipelines, lakehouses, and streaming systems that hold up under real load.
    • Vector databases sitting next to OLAP, and training-data quality as model quality.
    • Data contracts, lineage, and freshness when AI features depend on the same plumbing as dashboards.
    • Training data, evaluation sets, and the feedback loop between product and pipeline.
    • Analytics engineering between raw events and product decisions.
  7. 07

    Security and trust

    • Security engineers
    • Backend engineers
    • Platform engineers
    • CISOs
    • Tech leads

    What we cover

    • Supply-chain security, dependency hygiene, and identity wired into builder workflows.
    • Prompt injection, agent boundaries, and sensitive-data exfiltration in AI features.
    • Authn, authz, and secrets management when agents act on behalf of users.
    • Compliance, audit, and the new evidence you need for AI-powered features.
    • Threat modeling for a dual-use world where defenders and attackers share tools.
  8. 08

    Quality and testing in a non-deterministic world

    • QA engineers
    • SDETs
    • Backend engineers
    • Frontend engineers
    • ML engineers

    What we cover

    • Testing for distributed systems: contract tests, deterministic CI, observability-driven QA.
    • Evals, guardrails, and regression suites for LLM-powered features and agents.
    • Synthetic data and replay traffic for testing nondeterministic systems.
    • Shift-left vs shift-right when half the failures only show up in production.
    • Metrics that actually correlate with users trusting your AI feature.
  9. 09

    Engineering leadership in a shifting stack

    • CTOs
    • VPEs
    • Engineering managers
    • Tech leads
    • Staff+ engineers

    What we cover

    • Team design, hiring, and training in a world where AI touches most engineering work but only a slice is genuinely delegated.
    • Build vs buy, platform choices, and governance for tools that change every quarter.
    • Budget, headcount, and ROI conversations when half the tooling is changing under you.
    • Leading through ambiguity when neither vendors nor benchmarks have caught up yet.
    • Architectural decisions that compound across the next two years.

What You'll Do

Builders Zone

A floor for the people who'd rather be building.

The part of the event built around the work itself, not the watching. Time and room to actually open the laptop, a place to pair on something gnarly, and a crowd of developers deep in the same problems you are.

  • 01

    Build.

    Sit down, open the laptop, work on the thing you came in with. Pair on it with someone who's solved it before, or figure out where it's stuck with someone who hasn't.

  • 02

    Show.

    Demo what you've made to a room of developers who'll actually try to break it. Useful, weird, or broken-but-interesting — all of it.

  • 03

    Trade.

    Compare stacks, prompts, configs, and review loops with the people doing the work. The unscheduled half of the value of being here.

Moments

Where Big News Happens First.

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on stage at WeAreDevelopers as a slide reads '80% of code will be written by AI', during the first public demo of GitHub Copilot.
Thomas Dohmke unveils Copilot at WeAreDevelopers.

Product launch

GitHub Copilot Launch

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke took the WeAreDevelopers stage for not only his first public appearance, but also to unveil the first public demo of GitHub Copilot.
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar on the WeAreDevelopers stage announcing OverflowAI.
Prashanth Chandrasekar reveals OverflowAI on the main stage.

Product launch

OverflowAI Launch

Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar revealed OverflowAI - Stack Overflow's answer to Copilot live on the WeAreDevelopers stage.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee in conversation on the WeAreDevelopers main stage.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee in conversation at the WeAreDevelopers main stage.

Keynote

Sir Tim's Vision

The inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, outlined his vision for the future of the web, where people regain control of their data.
Microsoft speakers Amanda Silver, Scott Hanselman, Chris Heilmann and Torsten Stiller on the WeAreDevelopers stage.
Microsoft on stage announcing the end of Internet Explorer.

Announcement

Death of IE

Microsoft's Amanda Silver, Scott Hanselman, Chris Heilmann, and Torsten Stiller announced the end of Internet Explorer and unveiled a bold vision for the future of browsers.
Rocket-themed stage moment at WeAreDevelopers, when partner Rapyd announced a coding challenge with a trip to space as the prize.
Rapyd's coding challenge with a trip to space as the prize.

Partner moment

A Trip to Space

A trip to space (literally) was offered to two lucky developers by WeAreDevelopers partner Rapyd, as they launched an out-of-this-world coding challenge!
Tiësto's stage at the WeAreDevelopers party, with magenta light beams over the crowd.
Tiësto headlining the WeAreDevelopers after-show.

After-dark

Tiësto at the Party

Legendary DJ Tiësto took center stage at the biggest developer party ever, proving that they not only work hard but also play hard.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak speaking on stage at WeAreDevelopers.
Steve Wozniak on tech's next disruptors.

Keynote

Insights from Woz

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak captivated the audience by sharing his insights and sparking discussions about tech's next disruptors.
Stack Overflow founder Joel Spolsky on the WeAreDevelopers stage talking about Generative AI.
Joel Spolsky declares the GenAI era from the main stage.

Keynote

Spolsky about GenAI

Founder of Stack Overflow and Trello, Joel Spolsky, announced the next big era of the web: Generative AI.

Sponsorship

Become a Partner

WeAreDevelopers brings together the engineers, architects, and decision-makers building software for the AI era. Put your brand, product, and roles in front of an audience that actually evaluates, adopts, and ships.

From the floor

WeAreDevelopers is probably the most authentic and largest developer conference out there. Never have we met so many interesting, top caliber people that are driven by passion for their work. If you can only go to one conference, go there!
Accenture
  • NVIDIA
  • Microsoft
  • SAP
  • Google Cloud
  • AWS
  • IBM
  • Oracle
  • Red Hat
  • Accenture
  • Atlassian
  • Datadog
  • Dynatrace
  • Docker
  • Twilio
  • Mercedes-Benz
  • Volkswagen
  • Vodafone
  • Bosch
  • Deutsche Bank
  • + many more
San José 26 host-city graphic

Capital of Silicon Valley

San José Welcomes WeAreDevelopers

WeAreDevelopers is partnering with San José to bring the world's largest developer event to North America, fostering global growth and connection in the tech sector.

We are thrilled to host the WeAreDevelopers World Congress and welcome thousands of developers who will come to build, learn, and exchange ideas.

Mayor Matt Mahan
Docker × WeAreDevelopers stage moment

Presenting Partner

Docker and WeAreDevelopers Bring the World's Largest Developer Event to North America

Docker joins WeAreDevelopers as presenting partner to bring the world's largest developer event to North America — creating the truly immersive, high-energy, community-driven experience developers have long been waiting for.

With developers leading the charge into AI, this collaboration is built on a shared mission to empower builders of all kinds and to provide a space to connect, explore, and shape what's next in AI, cloud, software development, and open source.

But this is more than just an event — it's where we celebrate the craft of software and the energy, creativity, and ambition of the builder community. It's a shared commitment to the future of software — and the people building it.

Join us as we make history in San José.

Covered By

  • TechCrunch
  • Forbes
  • Business Insider
  • The New Stack
  • ZDNet
  • Reuters
  • The Economist
  • Startup Insider

Tickets

Pick Your Ticket. Prices Go Up as We Get Closer.

Congress Pass

Most popular
$679
Single Ticket
$609
Group (4+)
Regular price: $1,399

Three days, every stage, the expo, the after-party, on-demand recordings.

VIP Pass

$1,619
Regular price: $2,999

All-access. Tech Leaders Summit, Tech Leaders Night, private lounges, dedicated entry.

Student Pass

$129
Regular price: $1,399

Affordable rate for full-time students. Full Congress Pass access.

Attending with a team?

Bring developers, platform engineers, security leads, DevOps/SREs, and engineering managers. Split across sessions, compare notes daily, and return with a shared view on what to adopt, what to test, and what to avoid.

Group discounts are applied automatically based on group size, and shown per ticket on the pricing page when you add multiple seats.

A Personal Message

Explore What Makes WeAreDevelopers Unique

We created WeAreDevelopers to be more than just another conference. It’s a place where the global developer community comes together to learn from each other, to discover new tools and ideas, and to celebrate the craft of building software. Every year, thousands of developers, engineers, and tech professionals join us to exchange knowledge, challenge assumptions, and push technology forward — together.

What makes WeAreDevelopers special is the atmosphere. It’s professional and ambitious, but also personal, inspiring, and fun. You’ll find world-class tech talks and workshops next to live coding sessions, a buzzing expo floor, and moments that remind you why you started building in the first place.

It’s the energy, the people, and the shared belief that technology can make the world better — that’s what defines WeAreDevelopers.

Sincerely,

Sead Ahmetovic

CEO, WeAreDevelopers

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