What is DevFest?
DevFest is the world's largest community-driven tech conference, bringing together passionate developers from around the globe. Hosted annually by Google Developer Groups, DevFest offers a unique opportunity to explore cutting-edge developer tools, learn from Google and Google Developer Experts, and connect with fellow developers in your local community.
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Session Catalog
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Fuse Conference Center 1311
Amanda J Kendal-Brown
Two Tablets, One Bench: Real-Time Multiplayer at the Edge with Durable Objects and Workers AI (Capital One)
10:00 am
Breakout Session
Picture two roller derby coaches at opposite ends of a bench, both holding tablets and both needing to see the same jam unfold in real time, with no backend team, no compromise on the live experience, and a third read-only tablet they can hand to whoever wanders over. That’s Bench Witch, and the underlying problem is everywhere: collaborative whiteboards, multi-user POS systems, shared dashboards, and any product where multiple clients need to edit shared state in real time.
About the Speaker(s)
Amanda Kendal-Brown is a Senior Front-End Engineer at Capital One with a decade of experience building accessible, AI-enabled web applications in React, TypeScript, and Vue. She built Bench Witch, the subject of this talk, for her own roller derby team. Outside of code, Amanda is a two-sport international athlete, representing Trinidad & Tobago on the National Archery Team and Team West Indies at three Roller Derby World Cups (2014, 2018, 2025). She is also a classically-trained percussionist specializing in steel pan and orchestral percussion, and currently performs baritone with the Reading Buccaneers Drum & Bugle Corps. Based in Fairfax, VA, she's passionate about building tools for the communities she's part of and bringing underrepresented voices to the technical stage.
Fuse Conference Center 1311 Split 100
Allen Firstenberg, Noble Ackerson
Immersive vs Ambient XR: The Debate - Allen Firstenberg x Noble Ackerson (myTurn pbc)
10:00 am
Breakout Session
A debate is raging in the XR community - which is the "correct" form factor for Intelligent Eyewear? Should we be focusing on the ambient experience from "AI Glasses" such as the models now appearing from Google, Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker? Or should we have more of an immersive AR or VR experience, such as those from XREAL or the Apple VisionPro? Allen and Noble continue their many-year-long debate on this topic, last heard at DevFest DC in 2017. Which is the right technology?
About the Speaker(s)
By day, Allen is a Senior Project Engineer at spiders.com where he’s been instrumental in creating websites and mobile apps for companies and organizations, ranging from the American Booksellers Association to the National Science Foundation. By night he creates tools, software, and tutorials to help people share their stories and improve their digital lives. You'll find him contributing to the LangChainJS open-source project, as one of the two hosts of the "Two Voice Devs" podcast, and co-author of the O’Reilly book “Designing and Developing for Google Glass”. He is a Google Developer Expert for Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and the Google Assistant and has been known to occasionally wear light blue shirts.
Noble Ackerson is the Senior Director of AI and Agentic Solutions at Leidos, a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for AI, and an instructor for Udacity's Agentic AI programs. With over 19 years of experience bridging software engineering and machine learning, Noble focuses on "calibrated trust", building responsible, governed, and highly performant distributed multi-agent systems that survive real-world deployment. He actively prototypes at the intersection of generative UI, spatial computing, and vendor-agnostic agent orchestration.
Van Metre Multipurpose 126
Bryce Howitson
Human Computer Interaction: The UX of AI - Bryce Howitson (Availity)
10:00 am
Breakout Session
Prompt Engineer, so hot right now! Do you wonder why we need an entire specialization dedicated to communicating with a computer? Does it feel like "it just doesn't get you" when "chatting" with AI tools? In this session, we'll cover the history of ways humans have communicated with computers. You'll see why "natural language" doesn't seem to translate as you expected. Finally, you'll learn options for creating an interface with AI that doesn't require a special title. Along the way, you'll learn to create trust and reduce hallucinations.
About the Speaker(s)
Bryce is obsessed with creating products that people want to use. He helps organizations of all sizes test, and ship their ideas. Bryce has been speaking since the age of 3. Sometimes called a designer, a developer, a strategist, a writer, and even a carpenter, he has led teams and worked in the trenches. Bryce is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, a certified Design Sprint Master, a list over-user, and a recovering "filler word" addict. He shares his knowledge by mentoring and teaching from his homeland, the not-always-frozen Minnesota.
Fuse Conference Center 1311
Chanel Power
#AirClaw: Build Self-Healing Agents with Apache Airflow and NVIDIA NemoClaw - Chanel Power (Mentor Me Collective)
10:50 am
Breakout Session
#AirClaw demonstrates how Apache Airflow and NVIDIA NemoClaw transform static pipelines into autonomous agents that reason, act, and escalate intelligently. Two live demos ( a NYC 311 overnight triage agent and an automated LLM model migration evaluation comparing GPT-4o against Llama-3.3-Nemotron-Super ) show the same three-layer architecture solving real production problems across two completely different domains.
About the Speaker(s)
A Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer Relations leader, and Founder & CEO of Mentor Me Collective, Chanel operates at the intersection of technical excellence and global access. She has shipped production ML systems, advised 30+ early-stage AI product teams annually, and built a global technical institute serving 40K+ developers across 120+ countries, generating $45M+ in career outcomes for 600+ first-generation technologists. Mentor Me Collective is a Google for Startups partner, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center alumni, and by every measure, a developer relations program at true scale, with enablement programs running at 3x industry engagement benchmarks and partnerships spanning Google Cloud, IBM, and Grow with Google.
Fuse Conference Center 1311 Split 100
Santosh Srinivasaiah
Systems That Settle: Control Theory for Adaptive AI - Santosh Srinivasaiah (Diaconia LLC)
10:50 am
Breakout Session
Agents, recommenders, and reinforcement-learning loops all tune themselves at runtime — and most ship with no guarantee they'll settle rather than oscillate, drift, or quietly degrade until it surfaces in production. We're good at building systems that adapt, and bad at proving they'll behave. Control engineers solved a version of this decades ago. Lyapunov stability theory proves a system converges to its target instead of assuming it will — the same principle that keeps a self-driving car centered in its lane. This session brings it to the systems we build now, and is honest about the catch: a proof is only as strong as the model beneath it. The math is rigorous; the assumptions are where the risk hides. That line — what the proof buys, and where it stops — is the talk.
About the Speaker(s)
Santosh Srinivasaiah is Vice President of Data Science & Analytics at Diaconia, with over 25 years of experience building AI systems at the intersection of computational neuroscience and generative AI. He has spent many years architecting machine-learning platforms for regulatory science, and today leads the design of generative and agentic AI grounded in brain-inspired algorithms. A published researcher across neuroscience and applied AI, he is the architect of STACS, a framework that applies Lyapunov stability theory to bring provable convergence guarantees to adaptive cognitive systems — the same principle at the heart of this talk. He teaches as adjunct faculty at Northern Virginia Community College and is a member of the ACM and IEEE. A returning DevFestDC speaker, Santosh is back to share how control theory can make the systems we build actually settle
Van Metre Multipurpose 126
Brandon Wagner
Kubernetes Node Autoscaling w/ Karpenter - Brandon Wagner (Oxide Computer Company)
10:50 am
Breakout Session
Kubernetes has changed how we manage cloud and on-prem environments. But some aspects of the node lifecycle have not fully embraced the Kubernetes API. This has meant context-switching between IaC tools and Kubernetes which adds unnecessary complexity. Karpenter aims to modernize node autoscaling and lifecycle management in Kubernetes: it auto-discovers cloud capabilities, launches the best hardware for the job, and powers it down when it's no longer needed. Come learn about Karpenter and see it in action!
About the Speaker(s)
Brandon Wagner graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor's in Computer Science and a master's in Information Security. He began his career working on fire protection software for nuclear power plants before spending over eight years at AWS, working on EC2, EKS, and Route 53. He worked on Karpenter pre-launch and as a core maintainer for several years after. Brandon now works at Oxide Computer Company, where he brings cloud and Kubernetes capabilities to hardware that you own!
Build with AI + Code Labs - Van Metre Multipurpose 125
Kiruthika Subramani
Build the same AI agent in six frameworks and learn which one actually fits your problem - Kiruthika Subramani (Bell Canada)
10:50 am
Breakout Session
Everyone has a favourite framework. Nobody has tried all of them on the same problem. You learned LangChain from a tutorial. Your colleague swears by ADK. Someone says AgentKit is the future. CrewAI keeps showing up in multi-agent demos. And your manager asks why you are writing code when Vertex AI Agent Builder exists. Each one solves a different problem and picking the wrong one means weeks fighting the framework instead of building your product.
About the Speaker(s)
I am Kiruthika Subramani, a Data Scientist at Bell, Canada. Did my Master's at MILA, the Quebec AI Institute. I have written two books on AI, delivered over 250 talks across the globe, and published more than 100 blogs. My recognitions include being a Google Developer Expert in AI, an IBM Champion for Data and AI, and a Women Techmakers Ambassador. My experience includes serving as the former Head of AI at Musitechnic Formation and interning at Amazon. I am a nine-time certified cloud practitioner (4x GCP, 5x AWS) and was honoured to be named the Women in AI Scholarship Award Winner for 2025.
Fuse Conference Center 1311 Split 100
Chrystian Vieyra Cortes
AppFunctions: Making Your Android App Agent-Ready - Chrystian Vieyra Cortes (Thomson Reuters)
11:45 am
Breakout Session
The AppFunctions Jetpack framework allows apps to expose structured, callable capabilities directly to the OS and on-device AI agents. This marks a fundamental shift away from fragile screen scraping and rigid intents, enabling true agentic development where models natively discover and invoke your app's features. We will demystify how AppFunctions work and contrast them with older approaches like App Actions and MCP. Through a focused code demo, you will see how to define typed, callable functions that allow agents to execute tasks straight from natural language prompts.
About the Speaker(s)
I am a mobile engineering leader focused on building strong teams and mobile apps that reach millions of users. I am currently Director of Software Engineering at Thomson Reuters, where I lead mobile engineering for the Reuters app. My work focuses on engineering execution, platform modernization, and helping distributed teams deliver high-quality mobile experiences.
Van Metre Multipurpose 126
Alexandrea Stylianou
Schema Archaeology: How AI accelerated an Undocumented Database to an Autonomous Finance Agent - Alexandrea Stylianou (Tatto Forma)
11:45 am
Breakout Session
It’s Monday morning and the Accounts Payable team gets a Slack message: “Why was invoice INV-2291 flagged, and how much exposure do we have with this vendor?” The data is in a legacy Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) system — dozens of tables, no data dictionary, weak foreign keys, and a schema that only one retiring analyst ever fully understood. Unfortunately, a generic chatbot would only give guesses or a junior analyst would spend half the day tracing data across joins nobody documented. I will show you how I built a P2P Context Engine to handle exactly that kind of question — end to end, with financial precision.
About the Speaker(s)
Data Architect, Data Scientist, and ML/AI expert who builds production applications to transform data into faster decisions, lower risk, and better customer outcomes.
Fuse Conference Center 1311
Christina Lin
Architecting Long-Running, Resumable Agents with ADK 2 - Christina Lin (Google)
1:30 pm
Breakout Session
What happens when your AI agent needs to join a queue of 14,000 people, wait 40 minutes, survive a process crash mid-wait, and spend $400 of real money while you’re asleep? Most agent tutorials teach you how to prompt. This hands-on workshop teaches you how to build long running agents using Google Cloud and the Agent Development Kit (ADK 2), you will hands-on build a ticketing agent from scratch and then break it. We'll pull the plug mid-execution, simulate race conditions, enforce financial spending fences, and deploy a resumable agent architecture that runs without you in the room.
About the Speaker(s)
As the Lead Advocate for Google Americas, Christina Lin bridges the gap between cutting-edge technologies and developer success. With deep expertise in Agentic systems, and modern cloud architectures—including Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Java, Python, and Ansible—she creates dynamic technical content and live demonstrations that drive the adoption of intelligent, scalable best practices. An open-source champion at heart, Christina’s mission is to cultivate a highly collaborative, innovative, and deeply connected global developer community ready for the AI era.
Fuse Conference Center 1311 Split 100
Pragya Keshap
From APIs to AI Agents - Pragya Keshap (Schwab)
1:30 pm
Breakout Session
In this session, we will explore how to design a secure tool-calling workflow using Gemini, Agent Development Kit, and Google Cloud. Attendees will learn how to move from a simple chatbot prototype to a production-ready agent architecture that can safely call enterprise APIs, return structured responses, and log actions for review.
About the Speaker(s)
I help organizations build scalable, secure, and AI-ready infrastructure on Google Cloud. As a Google Developer Expert, I specialize in Kubernetes, GKE, enterprise cloud architecture, and AI/ML infrastructure — bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and real-world enterprise adoption. My work spans technical thought leadership, open-source contributions within the CNCF ecosystem, and speaking at global conferences where I share practical insights on cloud-native transformation. I'm also actively involved in research at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and AI.
Build with AI + Code Labs - Van Metre Multipurpose 125
Ramandeep Arora
Beyond the Cloud: Building Physical AI with Embedded Systems - Ramandeep Arora (Stanley Black & Decker)
1:30 pm
Breakout Session
Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to the cloud or screens - it is beginning to live inside the physical world. From smart wearables that monitor heart rate and detect anomalies in real time to industrial power tools that automatically adjust torque under changing load conditions, intelligence is shifting closer to where data is created and actions actually happen. This shift, often called edge computing, or physical AI, is redefining how we think about intelligence in everyday systems.
About the Speaker(s)
I'm Ramandeep Arora, and I'm an Embedded Software Engineer at Stanley Black & Decker, specializing in motor controls, IoT, and robotics systems for the power tools and industrial trade industry. I'm passionate about Embedded AI and Edge Intelligence with a focus on bringing machine learning closer to physical systems. Experienced on microcontrollers, motor controls, and building reliable, production-grade embedded solutions and advocating for making smart sustainable devices with advanced technology that is accessible and human-centric through engineering and community engagement.
Fuse Conference Center 1311 Split 100
Chris Whong
Great Maps Don't Happen by Accident: Building Exceptional Location Experiences with the Mapbox Android SDKs - Chris Whong (Mapbox)
2:20 pm
Breakout Session
Maps, search, navigation, real-world data — your users expect it all, and Mapbox delivers it in a single location platform built for Android developers. In this session, we'll start from zero and build up a fully featured location experience live: custom map styles, GeoJSON overlays, a working Search Box integration, and a turn-by-turn navigation flow with simulated routes and voice. We'll also cover what's new across the Mapbox ecosystem and show off the developer tools that help you move from idea to shipped feature, fast.
About the Speaker(s)
As a Senior Developer Evangelist at Mapbox with over four years of experience, I focus on enhancing developer relations and technical documentation to empower developers and facilitate their success. My work revolves around leading the development of docs.mapbox.com, a multi-site platform with millions of annual views, where I aim to create user-friendly, dynamic documentation and interactive tools. My expertise spans GIS, spatial analysis, and urban planning, all aimed at building innovative tools at the intersection of maps, data, and technology.
Fuse Conference Center 1311
Noble Ackerson
The Invisible City: Building Real-Time Spatial Agents (and Surviving Reality) - Noble Ackerson (Leidos)
3:15 pm
Breakout Room
If your multi-agent pipeline forces users to watch a loading spinner while it thinks, you have already lost them. But if your agent hallucinates a high-pressure gas line on a city street, you have a much bigger problem. Aligned with the "Build Edition" theme, this session strips away the "Hello, World" chatbot boilerplate to walk through the architecture of The Invisible City—a real-time, see-through AR visualization of underground municipal infrastructure. We will dissect how to pair Gemini’s multimodal vision capabilities with a Next.js and FastAPI stack to build event-driven agents that actually interact with the physical world.
About the Speaker(s)
Noble Ackerson is the Senior Director of AI and Agentic Solutions at Leidos, a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for AI, and an instructor for Udacity's Agentic AI programs. With over 19 years of experience bridging software engineering and machine learning, Noble focuses on "calibrated trust", building responsible, governed, and highly performant distributed multi-agent systems that survive real-world deployment. He actively prototypes at the intersection of generative UI, spatial computing, and vendor-agnostic agent orchestration.
Van Metre Multipurpose 126
Meheret Egzerab
Lessons from Shipping a Real App: Vibe Coding in Production - Meheret Egzerab (Studio Rehoboth)
3:15 pm
Breakut Room
I vibe-coded a consumer iOS app and shipped it solo, ~5,000 downloads, ~33% paid conversion, zero ad spend. This talk is everything those numbers didn't teach me until after I shipped. I'll walk through the real lessons from taking AI-assisted code into production: the layer AI silently skips (error reporting and the analytics that actually predict retention and conversion), the AI-generated code that broke in ways I didn't see coming. Real dashboards, real crash logs, real numbers, including the app I'm still getting wrong right now.
About the Speaker(s)
Meheret Egzerab is the solo founder of Studio Rehoboth, a one-person app studio, where she designs, builds, and ships consumer apps using AI-assisted development. She previously worked as a software engineer at Capital One. She speaks and writes about what it actually takes to ship AI-built software into production as a team of one.
Build with AI + Code Labs - Van Metre Multipurpose 125
Kiruthika Subramani
Build AI agents your compliance team will actually approve - Kiruthika Subramani (Bell Canada)
3:15 pm
Breakout Session
Everyone has a favourite framework. Nobody has tried all of them on the same problem. You learned LangChain from a tutorial. Your colleague swears by ADK. Someone says AgentKit is the future. CrewAI keeps showing up in multi-agent demos. And your manager asks why you are writing code when Vertex AI Agent Builder exists. Each one solves a different problem, and picking the wrong one means weeks fighting the framework instead of building your product.
About the Speaker(s)
I am Kiruthika Subramani, a Data Scientist at Bell, Canada. Did my Master's at MILA, the Quebec AI Institute. I have written two books on AI, delivered over 250 talks across the globe, and published more than 100 blogs. My recognitions include being a Google Developer Expert in AI, an IBM Champion for Data and AI, and a Women Techmakers Ambassador. My experience includes serving as the former Head of AI at Musitechnic Formation and interning at Amazon. I am a nine-time certified cloud practitioner (4x GCP, 5x AWS) and was honoured to be named the Women in AI Scholarship Award Winner for 2025.
Fuse Conference Center 1311
Olga Ostrovskiy
From Bookshelf to Borderline: Building a Multi-Agent AI That Turns Books Into Travel - Olga Ostrovskiy (My Storyland)
4:05 pm
Beakout ession
What if an AI could read a novel and hand you an itinerary? That's the question behind My Storyland — a multi-agent Gemini system that extracts real-world locations from literary works and transforms them into personalized travel experiences. In this talk, I'll walk through how I designed and built a collaborative agent architecture — Guide, Book Searcher, Location Extractor, and Composer — that doesn't just chain prompts, but assigns distinct roles, manages context handoffs, and synthesizes outputs into something genuinely useful. I'll cover how I evaluated agent performance using Langfuse, why human-in-the-loop checkpoints matter even when your agents "work," and how Pydantic-validated schemas keep your agent outputs structured and trustworthy instead of free-form and fragile.
About the Speaker(s)
Olga Ostrovskiy is a lead software engineer and founder of My Storyland (mystoryland.ai), a book-inspired travel platform powered by a multi-agent Gemini AI architecture. She placed 3rd at Google's 5-Day AI Agents Intensive (December 2025) for her work on My Storyland and is currently building it into a startup. She builds with NestJS, React, and Google's AI stack.
Van Metre Multipurpose 126
Ammar Ekbote
Moving Beyond the Prompt: Powering Google Antigravity with MCP Servers - Ammar Ekbote (Pinterest)
4:05 pm
Breakout Session
In this talk, we will explore the architecture of local (stdio) and remote (HTTP) MCP servers within the Antigravity suite (2.0, IDE, and CLI). We’ll walk through how to build a custom MCP server from scratch, securely handle authentication via Application Default Credentials (ADC), and set up strict access control policies. Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of how to transform an AI from a text generator into an autonomous development partner capable of safely executing data-aware workflows.
About the Speaker(s)
Ammar Govind Ekbote is a Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest, where he focuses on building and scaling global software infrastructure. An expert in distributed data systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and kernel-level observability, Ammar has a proven track record of bridging complex back-end architectures with emerging AI technologies. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. With 9+ approved U.S. patents and extensive experience judging elite hackathons and industry innovation awards, Ammar is passionate about building secure, context-aware systems that empower the next generation of AI-driven development tools.
Other speakers
Josh Gordon
Head of AI Developer Relations
Google
Josh Gordon
Head of AI Developer Relations
Google
Josh Gordon
Head of AI Developer Relations
Google
Josh Gordon
Head of AI Developer Relations
Google

9AM — 6PM | Oct 3, 2025

DevFest DC

Fuse at Mason Square, 3401 Fairfax Dr
Arlington, VA 22226
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