Thank you, Devoxxians: Devoxx Belgium 2026, wrapped
Same cinema, same week, one year on. Want to be on stage? The Call for Papers runs from 1 June to 16 July 2027. Want a seat? Registration opens on 16 August 2027 at reg.devoxx.be, and you can sign up for a reminder on the site today.
From developers to builders.
Thank you, Devoxxians.
Five days, full cinema rooms, close to 3K Devoxxians, and more hallway conversations than any of us could keep up with. Thank you to every attendee, speaker, sponsor and volunteer who made this year’s edition what it was. If you missed a talk, or want to see one again, the recordings are already up, including hundreds of magnificent photos.
Our thank-you to everyone who made the week. Watch the Thank You video →
→ status: done, thank you
→ recordings: 192 on YouTube, free
→ photo-albums: 5 on Flickr, one per day
→ next-edition: 04/10/2027 – 08/10/2027
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“From developers to builders.”
Developers are becoming builders. As agents, spec-driven development and ever more capable coding assistants take on more of the typing, the job is shifting from writing every line to deciding what gets built, shaping how it fits together, and making sure it works. That shift ran through the whole week, and it is the theme Devoxx Belgium 2027 will carry forward.
If you missed Stephan’s opening keynote, make sure to watch it here.
Five more keynotes followed the welcome, back to back. All of them are on YouTube.
Jean-Laurent de Morlhon
Ron Pressler
Victor Rentea
This year we made something a little different: Devoxx the mini series, four short AI-generated films. From The Rebellion to the Kinepolis in the year 2170, all four episodes are on YouTube now.
Packed cinema rooms, a buzzing exhibition floor, and two humanoid robots that took the main stage in front of a full audience. See for yourself…
Full rooms, a full exhibition floor, and not one but two humanoid robots who stole the show on the main stage.
46,538 favourites. You built the schedule.
Every heart you tapped in the Devoxx Companion app helped decide which talks got the biggest cinema rooms, and every rating went straight back to the speaker. Here is what you did with it this year:
Like the year-end recap from your music app, but for a conference. Wrapped turns your own Companion activity into a short set of slides: your event in numbers, your top track, your favourite speaker, your rating style (The Generous One, Tough Crowd or The Balanced Reviewer), whether you were an Early Bird or a Night Owl, the hidden gem you rated higher than everyone else, your badges, and where you finished on the leaderboard.
So far 111 of you have opened theirs, 129 times in total. Each slide can be saved as an image or shared, and you can download your data as JSON. If you favourited or rated talks during the week, yours is waiting.
What 175 talks said, read side by side.
Nobody can attend every session. So Google built something that could. The Devoxx Digest takes the live transcripts, room occupancy votes and favourites from the Devoxx Companion app, and uses Gemini to read across all of them at once: which ideas kept coming up, where speakers agreed, and where they flatly contradicted each other.
Its one-paragraph verdict on the week: Devoxx Belgium 2026 marked the end of unguided “vibe coding” and the rise of harness engineering, where compilers, architecture tests and strict type systems keep non-deterministic models in line. The bottleneck has moved from generating code to verifying it.
Speakers were overwhelmingly positive about all six. Only the code-review crisis and MCP drew any outright scepticism.
Tap a talk title to watch the full session on YouTube.
Nicolas Martignole, 0 to 350 Engineers on Claude Code: What Could Go Wrong? ▶
Sasha Podlesniuk, Stopping AI-Generated Architectural Drift ▶
Kim Lauwers, AI Doesn’t Click Buttons: Building APIs for the Agentic Age ▶
Tom O’Rourke & Ep Heijting, Building, Shipping and Governing AI Agents on Kubernetes ▶
Richard Gross, Secure Your Coding Agent Like It’s Malware ▶
The more interesting half of the Digest. Four questions on which speakers in different rooms gave opposite answers:
The crowd had opinions too. The most-favourited session of the week was Victor Rentea’s Architecture Observability and Guardrails, with 856 favourites. The fullest room, by attendees’ own occupancy votes, was Jonathan Vila López’s Agents With Seatbelts, at 99%. Both were talks about keeping AI-generated code under control.
The Digest is not just a report. Its Ask tab lets you put your own question to every transcript at once, and its Company Lens filters the whole conference down to what was said about one company’s products. Every quote links back to its talk.
What earned the audience?
The Digest tells you what speakers said. Bruno Borges wanted to know what people watched. The Devoxx 2026 YouTube dashboard takes a snapshot of every public Devoxx Belgium 2026 video on our channel and lets you slice it by topic, date and reach. You can even look up your own talk and see where it sits against the other 191.
The numbers below are from the dashboard’s snapshot of 20 October, eleven days after the closing talk.
Two talks broke 10,000 views. The top ten together account for 28% of all views.
This is the finding we like best. Bruno’s dashboard tags each video by keywords in its title. AI and agents dominate the catalogue, but the typical Java video draws more viewers and more likes:
→ ai-and-agents 79 videos · median 777 · 0.73%
→ java-and-jvm 46 videos · median 1,066 · 0.99%
→ testing-tooling 30 videos · median 1,076 · 0.79%
→ people-practice 27 videos · median 943 · 0.80%
→ architecture 23 videos · median 691 · 0.68%
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The like-rate leaderboard tells the same story. Among videos with at least 500 views, the highest like rates go to runtime talks: Ron Pressler’s Big Runtimes Make Efficient Programs (3.9%), Daniel Garnier-Moiroux and Josh Long’s Bootiful Security, and Juan Fumero’s talk on GPU computing in Java. And the two Java-platform talks in the top five were only published on 13 October, so they are still catching up.
Put the two analyses side by side and they line up. The most-watched video of the year is about leaving microservices for a modular monolith, which is exactly one of the four debates the Digest found speakers split on. The argument clearly did not stay in the room.
Read these as reach, not quality, as Bruno is careful to say. Videos published earlier have had more days to collect views, and topics are matched on title words only, so one talk can count towards several.
The median Devoxx video has fewer than 800 views, so there is a good chance your favourite talk is still waiting to be found. Watch it, like it, and share it with the colleague who could not make it to Antwerp. Speakers notice, and so do we.
Devoxx Belgium 2026 was only possible because these companies backed it. Thank you for another great week.
