Devdays - Unstacked Engineering Conference

Meet Alin Simion, Senior Cloud Engineer at CrowdStrike.

Alin works at the intersection of security and engineering, building and breaking complex systems.

His work focuses on understanding how systems behave under pressure, especially when AI and automation are involved, and how assumptions that seem reasonable at first can turn into vulnerabilities later.

Over the years, he’s worked across industry and academia, including research in adversarial machine learning, looking at how ML models used in real systems can be manipulated or fail due to malicious files.

Alongside that, he’s been teaching topics like operating systems security and malicious systems, staying close to both the theory and the reality of how these systems behave.

He brings to devdays a security-focused perspective on building, breaking, and analysing systems.

Talk: Your skill issues are not your only issues: OpenClaw's open flaws

→ https://www.devdays.ro/

“Software design as code” still sounds abstract to many teams.

In practice, architecture diagrams, ADRs, documentation, and design decisions often live separately from the systems they describe. They become outdated quickly, hard to maintain, or disconnected from the actual implementation.

This 1-day workshop with Marcin Samsonowski explores a different approach.

You’ll work through how software design can become versioned, automated, and integrated directly into the development lifecycle using structured notations like UML, BPMN, and C4, maintained as code with tools such as Mermaid, PlantUML, and Structurizr.

The workshop also explores how AI can help generate, evolve, and keep these artefacts aligned with the codebase over time.

The focus is on making design part of the system itself, choosing the right level of automation for your context, and using AI to close the loop between design, implementation, and documentation.

Workshop: Software Design as Code - from Concepts to AI-driven Automation
22 September · Iași, Romania

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

AI can already generate code faster than most teams can review it.

What becomes harder is designing systems that can still evolve once all that code starts accumulating.

That’s why modular design matters more now than ever. And why Balanced Coupling can become a superpower in the age of AI-assisted software engineering.

In this 2-day workshop, Vlad Khononov explores the Balanced Coupling model and how it can be used to make design decisions that keep systems adaptable as complexity grows.

You’ll apply the model directly to real design problems, from high-level architecture down to object interactions, while also learning how to work with coding agents to produce systems that hold up over time.

You leave with a tool you can use the next day to get genuinely better software out of AI, along with practical ways of thinking about modularity, complexity, and long-term system evolution.

Workshop: Hands On Balanced Coupling
21–22 September · Iași, Romania

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

Tools change quickly, and the landscape keeps shifting.
But principles tend to move more slowly.

When learning is anchored only in what is new, it becomes harder to decide what deserves attention and what can be left aside. Patterns and mental models provide that anchor. They help you evaluate novelty instead of simply adopting it.

devdays focuses on those deeper layers of understanding, the ones that remain useful even as stacks evolve.

With that perspective, change feels less overwhelming and easier to navigate.

Think in systems. Build to last.
https://www.devdays.ro/

Most engineering content teaches you how to use tools. Less of it helps you think about why systems end up the way they do. Understanding the context behind decisions that made sense at the time and didn't age well matters.

That gap stayed with us long enough that we ended up writing something about it.

The devdays manifesto is our attempt to articulate what we think matters in software engineering today. The thinking behind patterns and practices, and why learning should reflect the real challenges we face in our projects.

If that sounds like your kind of conversation, devdays is probably your kind of conference.

Read it here: https://www.devdays.ro/manifesto

“AI doesn’t work for me.”

Many engineers still feel that way after trying AI coding tools.

Sometimes the results are inconsistent. Sometimes the generated code creates more work later. Sometimes the workflow simply never clicks in a way that feels useful inside real projects.

This 2-day workshop with Gerald Versluis is here to change that.

You’ll work directly inside real codebases and engineering scenarios, exploring prompting techniques, coding agents, GitHub Copilot, MCP servers, and AI-assisted workflows beyond demos and autocomplete.

The focus is on understanding how to use these tools to streamline your day-to-day engineering work.

And by the end of the workshop, the goal is simple: go from “AI doesn’t work for me” to shipping software with AI as your co-pilot.

Skeptics especially welcome.

Workshop: AI-Powered Development: From Skeptic to Shipping
21–22 September · Iași, Romania

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

devdays workshops are open for registration 👇

Join Vlad Khononov for the 2-day Hands On Balanced Coupling workshop and learn how modular design becomes a competitive advantage in the age of AI-assisted software engineering, using the Balanced Coupling model to build systems that can evolve without collapsing into complexity.

Join Gerald Versluis for the 2-day AI-Powered Development: From Skeptic to Shipping workshop and explore how AI fits into real engineering workflows, from prompting and coding agents to shipping software.

Join Marcin Samsonowski for the 1-day Software Design as Code - from Concepts to AI-driven Automation workshop and learn how to treat software design as code: versioned, automated, and integrated into the development lifecycle.

Workshop groups are intentionally limited to keep the sessions hands-on and interactive.

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

It’s difficult to understand a system when you only look at it in fragments.

A one-hour talk can surface patterns, highlight trade-offs, and shift perspective. But some things only become clear when you stay with them longer and follow them through decisions, constraints, and the small details that don’t always fit into a slide.

That’s why devdays begins with two days of workshops.

Workshops create space for depth. For working through real scenarios, asking questions, and seeing how ideas hold up once applied in practice. They allow understanding to build gradually, instead of appearing all at once as insight.

By the time the conference begins, you’re no longer approaching topics from the outside. You’ve already spent time inside the system.

That changes how you listen, and what you notice.

https://www.devdays.ro/

Meet Vlad Khononov, author and software architect.

Vlad focuses on making sense of complex domains, untangling systems that have grown over time, and helping teams understand how structure and decisions shape what a system becomes.

Over the years, he’s worked across different roles, from hands-on engineering to architecture, always close to systems that had to evolve under real constraints.

His work focuses on understanding how systems behave and how to design them so they can evolve without becoming fragile.

Some of you might know his work through his books Learning Domain-Driven Design and Balancing Coupling in Software Design.

He was on our stage a few years ago, and returns this year with a new perspective on how systems grow and where they become difficult to change.

Talk: AI — The Golden Age of Modularity (or Why Robots Hate Big Balls of Mud)
Workshop: Hands On Balanced Coupling

→ https://www.devdays.ro/