Category: Conferences

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Artificial Intelligence Conferences Security

“Culture eats cyber strategy for breakfast”: Notes from 813 Tech Day’s Security Panel

I spent the morning and early afternoon of 813 Tech Day at Hotel Haya in Ybor. I’m still thinking about the Fortifying the Digital Frontier: Cybersecurity at the Forefront of Fintech Innovation session, largely because of the twist that host Michael Hall introduced, which made it different from every other “Cyber is important, yo!” panel I’ve sat through. About two-thirds of the way in, he stopped running the panel and turned it into a consulting engagement. On stage, for free, for a random attendee. And it worked!

Read on, and you’ll see.

A show of hands

Michael started by asking everyone who runs a company or product that touches money, customer data, or both to raise their hands.

Some hands went up, which wasn’t surprising.

Then he asked: “Keep them up if you have a single person whose actual job is nothing but security.”

All hands down.

And that moment was the panel in summary. A room full of people founding or working at companies (or hoping to found and work at them) handling money and PII, and essentially zero dedicated security headcount among them. To be fair, a number of them were solopreneurs. Still, Michael’s follow-up question was  an important one: “So what are you going to do about cyber warfare?”

Introducing the panel

The panel had unusually good coverage of the problem space: economic development, defense-grade compliance, offensive security, and someone who actually runs a bank.

They were, from left to right onstage:

The gap between passing the audit and actually defended

Michael’s next question was a good one: “What’s the widest gap between how secure fintechs think they are and how secure they actually are?”

Alexei’s answer was the cleanest formulation of the compliance trap: compliance does not equal security. You can check every box and still be wide open. His diagnosis of why startups get this wrong:

“We identify the target, then we fire, and then we aim.”

Speed first, aim later. But in banking, “later” can be expensive in ways founders don’t model. He mentioned that for an average-sized bank, a single day of downtime can put the bank’s license at risk.

Candace, coming from the defense side, made it concrete with the ATO, the Authorization to Operate. You bring in an assessor, they verify you’ve got your asset labeling and your SSO and your password policy, and you get the shiny gold star.

And then what?

“Are you updating your AV definitions after you have the ATO? Are you patching on a specific cadence? Are you continuously monitoring the controls you got a check box for?”

Compliance is a still-frame snapshot. Security is the whole movie. Everyone optimizes for the snapshot because that’s what gets audited, but forgets about the movie.

“Too small to matter” is not a security posture

Michael asked Aaron to scare the room, and to Aaron’s credit, he skipped the horror stories and reached for stats.

An attacker can get into essentially any internet-facing machine at almost any company inside an hour. Depending on whose telemetry you’re reading, that number is more like a few minutes. Someone in the audience called out CrowdStrike’s breakout-time figure, which is measured in seconds now.

Aaron’s framing:

“A breach is inevitable. Not if, but when. Your worst day is my every day. If it’s going to rain, you bring a raincoat, not an umbrella.”

That’s why “we’ll deal with it when it happens” isn’t a plan.

What AI did and didn’t change

Aaron summarized it well:

“AI lowered the skill floor for attackers and accelerated the execution timeline. It did not invent new attack classes.”

Phishing, smishing, and credential reuse: these are the same failure modes we’ve had for a couple of decades now. Attacks are just cheaper, faster, and automated now. All this means that your unpatched, password-shared, over-permissioned environment didn’t get more vulnerable; it just got found sooner.

He also had a nice riff on password policy whiplash. We spent years pushing everyone to 15–16 characters, guidance loosened again, and meanwhile the real-world state of the art is that password123 became password12345.

Alexei’s defensive take was the one that fintech founders in the room needed: his bank is doing “baby steps” on AI. Instead of a tool, the first step an AI policy and an AI strategy with actual guardrails. Because the failure mode isn’t anything as melodramatic as a rogue superintelligence, but something more mundane, such as an employee pasting client data into a public chatbot:

“Yes, you can get the answer. But now you’ve already lost that client data. It’s somewhere, and you don’t know who can get it.”

He also noted, matter-of-factly, that some of the adversaries in this space are state-funded. A small bank in Tampa versus a government-backed team is not a fair fight, which is precisely why the guardrails have process over motivation; policy and architecture over vigilance.

The compliance question founders actually care about: Which one pays?

When Michael asked which single compliance framework a founder should chase this year to unlock the most enterprise revenue, Aaron flagged it as a contentious opinion and we got the most useful ninety seconds of the panel:

  • SOC 2 Type II is the one. Depending on your market, it can move your ability to capture revenue by somewhere between 5% and 40%. Nearly everyone selling to enterprise ends up needing it anyway.
  • HIPAA is self-assessed. Draw your own conclusions about how rigorously that’s happening across the industry.
  • PCI DSS: If you’re doing payments and processing, you can largely offload it. Stripe already has it. Use their pipes; as a startup you can’t afford to build that infrastructure yourself.
  • Then there’s the practitioner’s trick: security people maintain crosswalks that map controls across frameworks. Do SOC 2 first and you’re roughly 70% of the way to ISO 27001. Do them in order and stop paying for the same control four times.

Candace added the necessary caveat: the right framework depends on your industry, and in defense you don’t get to choose; there are non-negotiable requirements.

Alexei pointed out that PCI DSS matters for finance the way HIPAA matters for healthcare, so “which framework” is downstream of “which industry.”

Candace’s advice for taking this to a board is deceptively simple: explain it in their language…

  • Bad: “We need to implement AC-2.”
  • Better: “We sell Cracker Jacks, here’s the system that keeps the Cracker Jack business running, here’s why this control protects it.”

The panel turned into a live advisory board

This is the part I’ve never seen at a conference.

An audience member who’s a consultant mentioned he’s got a client (transfer agents, handling bank relationships and a mountain of shareholder PII) who wants to point an agentic AI system at their overflowing email inbox.

The debate: should they be cloud-based, or reverse twenty years of industry momentum and go back to on-prem so they can hot-swap open-weight models without token costs and keep everything whitelisted?

Michael stopped the panel, brought the consultant to the front, declared the panelists a pop-up advisory board, and made them answer.

The responses split about how you’d expect from their backgrounds:

  • Alexei: Going on-prem relocates risk rather than eliminating it. It also means you’re now defending on two fronts: not just outsiders, but also insiders! You’re paying for infrastructure, security, and people. The “cheaper” assumption usually doesn’t survive contact with the invoice. When Microsoft ships patches every week, that’s a vendor doing work you’d otherwise be doing yourself, maybe badly.
  • Aaron: Go hybrid, on the grounds that nobody has a crystal ball about second- and third-order downstream constraints, and hybrid preserves optionality for next year.
  • Candace: Her world is mostly on-prem and air-gapped, so that’s where her instinct goes, insider threat and hiring burden included.
  • Paul: He’s a retired Rear Admiral, so he followed the Navy adage “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort” and declared the question outside his expertise and deferred to the other panelists. In my opinion, that earned him even more credibility.

Michael then asked for the consultant’s contact info so they can follow up in 60 days and report back to the room on what he actually decided. That’s the accountability loop conferences never close. I’ll keep tabs on this and let you know how it turned out.

After that, they did it again, this time with an attendee trying to break from defense-sector BDR work into commercial cybersecurity account management. They brought her to the front and gave her a live career consult.ation.

Candace’s advice was to stop being invisible on LinkedIn and start advertising the specific role she wants.

Aaron also had good cybersecurity-specific advice:

“Cybersecurity is one of the most arrogant professions on the planet. If you’re the one person they want to have a beer with afterward, you’ve already won.”

(I work in cyber. He’s right. In this field, being able to communicate humility is a cheat code.)

And finally, in a fit of audience participation, and after quickly consulting NetFoundry’s careers page (I work there and love it!), I stood up and asked her “How about starting with a Sales Development Rep role that works with Account Management? We have an opening at NetFoundry.”

She said “yes,” and Michael yelled “Joey’s got to get her the job!”

(She and I chatted afterward. Our conversation will be ongoing, and I guess I’ll have to follow up with Michael in 60 days…)

Tampa Bay resources you should know about

Paul’s whole reason for being there was to make people in the room aware of resources they might not have tapped:

  • The Florida High Tech Corridor spans 23 counties from Tampa Bay to the Space Coast, and deliberately plays Switzerland across all of them; there are no favorites among universities.
  • USF’s Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing is teaching ethics at the beginning of the degree rather than bolting it on senior year, on the theory that security is fundamentally a judgment-call discipline, not a checklist one. Elizabeth Nelson is the Corridor’s point of contact at USF.
  • SBIR/STTR grants are available from eleven different federal agencies, it’s non-dilutive funding, and the Corridor can help you go after it and match on top of it.
  • Don’t forget places like Embarc Collective, Tampa Bay Wave, and spARK Labs!
  • Florida’s structural advantage is dual-use! The military and commercial sides are unusually well connected here, and the biggest buyer in the world is a short drive away.

Closing round: What’s the one thing you can’t get wrong?

Michael went down the line and asked each panelist for the single thing a founder walking out with one weekend and a small budget can’t afford to get wrong:

  • Paul: Take the first step. Just do something. Anything.
  • Candace: “Culture eats cyber strategy for breakfast.” If your people haven’t internalized cyber hygiene, none of the rest matters. Her running metaphor all afternoon was brushing your teeth: you don’t deliberate about it, you just do it. Security should feel like that.
  • Aaron: Get business insurance, make sure it has carve-outs for cybersecurity, and make sure those carve-outs cover AI-driven attacks. That’s the one I hadn’t heard before and the one I’d act on tomorrow.
  • Alexei: Hire the right people. (Michael made him clarify for the audio: right people.)

My four take-aways from this session

  1. Compliance is a snapshot, security is a movie. If your controls aren’t monitored continuously, your ATO or SOC 2 report describes a company that existed on one Tuesday.
  2. The framework question has an actual answer: SOC 2 Type 2 first, offload PCI to your payment processor, use a crosswalk so you’re not re-implementing the same control in four vocabularies.
  3. AI didn’t create new attacks; it created new attackers. The skill floor dropped. The people who couldn’t do this eighteen months ago can do it now, at scale, cheaply. Your threat model didn’t change; your threat volume did.

Take-away number four is so good that I wanted to separate it from the rest:

4. Turning a panel into a pop-up advisory board bit was brilliant! Michael took real attendee problems, put them in front of a panel of experts, made them answer in public, and asked them to follow up in 60 days. This moved what the panel said from the rhetorical to the practical.

Let’s see more of this, please, and nicely done, Michael!

Categories
Conferences Editorial Meetups Tampa Bay What I’m Up To

Tampa Bay’s “Scenius” and 813 Tech Day

813 Tech Day happens in Tampa this Thursday, and whether you plan to attend (I’ll be at the Hotel Haya and Sapphire events) or observe from afar, keep this word in mind: Scenius.

What is scenius?

Scenius is a portmanteau of the words scene and genius, and it was coined by musician, music producer, and visual artist Brian Eno to describe the extreme creativity that groups, places, or “scenes” can generate.

Eno came up with the term as a way of countering the pervasive myth of the Lone Genius: the idea that innovation comes from a small, select set of Chosen Ones:

Brian Eno. Creative Commons photo by Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep (AVRO). Tap the image to see its source.

“Just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual,” he says in the video, “scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.”

Here’s Eno’s expanded definition of scenius, courtesy of Eno:

“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

…I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.”

Historical examples of scenius

Here are some examples of scenius, where the collective smarts, creativity, and passion of a group of people coming together to do great things is greater than the sum of its parts:

What conditions does scenius need?

Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired and former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, wrote that the geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

  • Mutual appreciation: Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
  • Rapid exchange of tools and techniques: As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
  • Network effects of success: When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
  • Local tolerance for the novelties: The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.
Austin Kleon
By Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0

Here’s what Austin Kleon, a writer and artist whose ideas have been adopted by the tech community, has to say about scenius:

Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

How do we grow Tampa’s scenius?

The short answer is: By showing up and participating in events like 813 Tech Day!

While the elements of scenius are in place for Tampa Bay’s tech scene, there’s still some way to go before Tampa can match places like Nashville (whose tech scene is bigger than you might think) never mind places like Austin, Charlotte, Indianapolis, and Raleigh.

The success or failure of Tampa’s tech scenius depends on us, the Tampeños who work in tech, creative, and related industries.

I’m originally from Toronto. While it has one of the hottest tech scenes in North America today, it wasn’t always that way.

While the city did launch some initiatives to change this, what truly made the difference was Toronto’s own tech community stepping up and organizing. We held events of all sizes, from regular meetups and user group meetings at pubs and lecture halls to independent conferences like Mesh, RubyFringe and FutureRuby to tech “camp” events to big corporate gatherings put on by the likes of the Canadian subsidiaries of IBM and Microsoft. We built places to get together, from hackerspaces such as Hacklab.TO (where I met Chris Olah as a young teenager; he’d go on to co-found Anthropic)…

…and Site3 coLaboratory to the MaRS Centre. In my work as a developer evangelist for Microsoft, I’ve met many students at Toronto’s fine universities and colleges, and they’re eager to crank out the ‘wares, both hard and soft, and they’re bright as all get-out. We built a great community bound together by cooperation, a strong social media scene and good old-fashioned face-to-face meetings. We got stuff done, and the stuff we did traveled far and wide. We built Toronto’s tech scenius, and it put the city on the map.

Can Tampa do the same? I believe so; it’s just up to us.

And now, 813 Tech Day!

Thursday, August 13, or 8/13, is 813 Tech Day. Brought to you by the folks behind Tampa Bay Tech Week and 727 Tech Day, it’s one day of sessions, discussions, workshops, get-togethers, and networking for Tampa Bay’s tech community, held in Tampa.

There’ll be value in what the presenters show and what the panelists say, but the real gold will be in simply showing up and meeting other people you might not have otherwise met and gaining ideas and inspiration you might not have otherwise had.

Or, as the saying goes, 80% of success is showing up. (In fact, you might want to read this recent article of mine about how showing up paid off for me.)

So show up at 813 Tech Day!

Want to know more about 813 Tech Day?

Recommended reading/viewing

Here’s another video with Brian Eno talking about scenius:

Genius Vs Scenius: You Don’t Need To Be Extraordinary To Create Extraordinary Things:

Here’s Austin Kleon’s talk, Steal Like an Artist, which has some elements in it that would later lead to him writing about scenius:

Also by Austin Kleon:

 

Other writing:

Categories
Conferences Meetups Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay Tech Week presents 813 Tech Day on 8/13!

Thursday, 8/13, is the day when we celebrate the techies and tech companies in the 813 area code: 813 Tech Day!

We recently celebrated the 727 area code, which covers Clearwater and St. Pete with a one-day, multi-event celebration of the area tech community, and on August 13th, we’re doing it again for the Tampa side of Tampa Bay. It’s being put together by the good people behind Tampa Bay Tech Week (with HyLo Innovation and W3RTech).

Are you in or near the 813 area code? Do you build systems or software for a living, or do you want to? Then you’ll want to mark Thursday, August 13 on your schedule and free it up for 813 Tech Day.

The essentials

  • When: Thursday, August 13, 2026
  • Where: Tampa. It’s a venue-hop (details below)!
  • Cost: Register on Luma → https://luma.com/rf58ieh3
  • Vibe: Panels, hands-on workshops, a lot of open networking, and an evening that keeps going

813 Tech Day happens in different places at different times!

813 Tech Day moves around Tampa, and it’s both a feature that lets you see places you might not have seen before and a way for you to get your steps in:

  • Look, I’m a night owl and a musician, so I’m not likely to be at the Sweat in the City workout event at the start of the day (I tend to work out after my 10 a.m. standup with my NetFoundry teammates). But if you like early morning workouts and want to do one with the Tampa tech scene, go!
  • Many sessions in the first half of the day happens at Cres Community in the Wellswood area (Rome Ave., south of Hillsborough), a very comfy-looking business event space.
  • There’s also a big morning session at Hotel Haya in Ybor City, where the 813 Tech Day AI Meetup & Co-working event will take place. I’ll be there.
  • Then, in the afternoon, the sessions move from Cres Community to Hotel Haya.
  • Finally, in the evening, things get social at The Sapphire Tampa.
Event name and location Group Time
Sweat In The City
6905 N Orleans Avenue		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 7:00 AM – 8:00 AM EDT
Registration and check-in
Cres Community		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 8:30 AM EDT
AI and the Workforce: How to Stay Competitive
Cres Community		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 9:00 AM EDT
813 Tech Day AI Meetup & Co-Working
Hotel Haya		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT
Founder Mental Resilience: How to Build Without Burning Out
Cres Community		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 10:00 AM EDT
From Idea to Impact: The Role of Strategic University & Healthcare System Partnerships in Healthtech
Cres Community		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 11:00 AM EDT
Fortifying the Digital Frontier: Cybersecurity at the Forefront of Fintech Innovation
Hotel Haya		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 1:00 PM EDT
Hyper-Connected Tampa: Building Resilient Telecom and IT Infrastructure for Regional Growth
Hotel Haya		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 2:00 PM EDT
Manufacturing Workforce & AI
Hotel Haya		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 3:00 PM EDT
Happy Hour Networking
The Sapphire Tampa		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 5:00 PM EDT
Closing Night Experience
The Sapphire Tampa		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 813 Tech Day 7:00 PM EDT

Why go?

Because this is basically a hometown game. 813 Tech Day crams the whole spread of Tampa Bay tech into one day and three venues, and the afternoon block at Hotel Haya is the real flex: cybersecurity in fintech, telecom/IT infrastructure resilience, and manufacturing workforce AI, back to back to back. Fortifying the Digital Frontier and Hyper-Connected Tampa are exactly the kind of conversations I show up for uninvited (don’t worry; I was invited). Zero-trust networking and infrastructure that doesn’t fall over are, not coincidentally, my day job.

The morning’s no slouch either. At Cres Community, there’ll be an AI-and-workforce panel, a founder mental health session that more conferences should be brave enough to program, and a healthtech partnerships talk that’ll be catnip if you’re anywhere near that space. If you like things more freeform, the 813 AI Meetup and Coworking event is happening at Hotel Haya, where I’ll be.

813 Tech Day wraps up at a place I’ve been meaning to check out: The Sapphire Tampa (a pretty stylin’ looking place in an unexpected location on Boy Scout Road) for  a networking happy hour and a closing night that, judging by past Tech Week events, does not believe in winding down early.

I’ll be around all day; come say hi! I’m the one with the accordion energy and strong opinions about cybersecurity, AI, zero-trust networking, and the future of computing.

Grab your spot: luma.com/rf58ieh3. For more info, check out 813techday.com.

See you in the 813!

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Conferences Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay Tech Week presents 727 Tech Day!

Monday, 7/27, is the day when we celebrate the techies and tech companies in the 727 area code: 727 Tech Day!

727 Tech Day is a one-day, all-in celebration of the St. Pete / Clearwater / Pinellas tech community, presented by the folks behind Tampa Bay Tech Week (with HyLo Innovation and W3RTech). If TBTW is the five-day, five-neighborhood sprawl, then 727 Tech Day as the encore focused on a single Tampa Bay county, with everybody in the same few rooms.

If you’re anywhere near the 727 and you build systems or software for a living, this is the easiest “yes” on your calendar this week.

The essentials

  • When: Monday, July 27, 2026
  • Where: Clearwater and St. Pete. It’s a venue-hop (details below)!
  • Cost: Register on Luma → luma.com/567lh3c0
  • Vibe: Panels, hands-on workshops, a lot of open networking, and an evening that keeps going

727 Tech Day moves around the county!

This isn’t a sit-in-one-ballroom-until-4pm situation. The day migrates across Clearwater and St. Pete, which is either a feature or a step-count challenge depending on your mood:

  • Sunrise yoga on the rooftop at Station House to kick things off. Yes, yoga. At a tech event. Bring your own mat or grab one onsite. I’m told no other tech event in Florida opens like this, and I believe it.
  • Morning sessions at Collaborative Labs (over at St. Petersburg College).
  • Afternoon sessions at NOVA 535 in downtown St. Pete.
  • Happy Hour Networking at 4 PM at the St. Pete Athletic Club, with three hours of the good stuff (founders, operators, investors, community folks, all in one place).
  • Closing Night at 7 PM at The Estate, because “conversations to activations” apparently requires at least one iconic venue and a proper send-off.
Event name and location Group Time
Rooftop Yoga
Station House		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM EDT
Registration and check-in
Collaborative Labs		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 8:30 AM to 9:00 AM EDT
St. Pete’s Economic Development Discussion
Collaborative Labs		 Tampa Bay Tech Week 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM EDT
Maritime and Defense Tech Panel Discussion
Collaborative Labs		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM EDT
Build Your AI Workflow Live Workshop
Nova 535		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
AI + Marketing What Actually Works In 2026
Nova 535		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT
Using AI As a Revenue Engine
Nova 535		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT
Raising Capital in 2026 For Your Business
Nova 535		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
727 Tech Day Networking
St. Pete Athletic		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
727 Tech Day Closing Celebration Sponsored by XUNA AI
The Estate		 Tampa Bay Tech Week – 727 Tech Day 7:30 PM to 12:00 AM EDT

Why go?

Because this is our scene! It shows up best when we show up. 727 Tech Day is pitched as “no filler, no fluff”. The afternoon track alone, which is a build-something-real AI workshop plus three panels that all promise to separate signal from hype, is worth the trip. Add the networking window and the closing night, and you’ve got a full day of the people you actually want to run into.

I’ll be around. Come say hi! I’m the one with the accordion energy and strong opinions about zero-trust networking.

Grab your spot: luma.com/567lh3c0. For more info, check out 727techday.com

See you in the 727!

Categories
Conferences Developer Relations

How to “work the room” at DevRelCon NYC 2026

DevRelCon NYC 2026 happens today and tomorrow!

DevRelCon was created by the developer relations agency Hoopy and began in London in 2015. It’s since grown into an international series of conferences with editions in London, Prague, San Francisco, Tokyo, China, Latin America, and online.

I’m speaking at this event, which is organized by Mike “Swift” Swift and Major League Hacking, the global community for early-career developers and software creators. It’s positioned as the premier conference for anyone working to grow developer adoption, spanning developer relations, developer experience, product marketing, platform product management, and everyone’s favorite three-letter acronym, GTM. In other words, it’s a room full of exactly the people my talk is about, which is either the best or the most terrifying possible audience for a talk on what the DevRel job market is really telling us. (Probably both.)

I’m here as of the many, many people you can meet. But meeting people requires a skill called “working the room.”

Fortunately for you, my life, whether as a developer advocate, musician, community organizer, and generally unhinged extrovert has me working the room regularly, and I’m sharing all my tricks in this article. There are a lot of them; feel free to scan this article, find the tips that work for you, and put them into practice!

Contents

  1. Before the conference
  2. At the conference (and conference events)
  3. After the conference

Before the conference

Do some homework

Review the schedule speaker bios, and sponsors (who’ll probably have a table in the exhibitor hall), so that you can determine:

  • What sessions do you want to attend? This will provide subject matter for conversations, as well as help you find other people who’ll be attending the same workshops/talks.
  • What speakers would you like to talk to? I’m a speaker, and I know that we’ve been told not to hide in the speaker ready room, but get out into the conference to mix, mingle, and start conversations. Think of us as “mini-hosts” for the event, and if our presentation covers a topic you’d like to talk about, please approach us!
  • What sponsors do you want to talk to? Is there some gear, software, or service that you’re interested in that some sponsor provides? Make a note to talk to them.

Arrive with goals

Decide what you want to achieve at DevRelCon, which can include any of the following:

  • Learning something new
  • Making new contacts or re-establishing old ones
  • Finding new work / hobby / social opportunities

Prepare your introduction

A one-line self-introduction is simply a single-sentence way of introducing yourself to people you meet at a conference. It’s more than likely that you won’t know more than a handful of attendees and introducing yourself over and over again, during the conference, as well as its post-session party events. It’s a trick that Susan RoAne, room-working expert and author of How to Work a Room: The Ultimate Guide to Making Lasting Connections In-Person and Online teaches, and it works. It’s pretty simple:

  • Keep it short — no longer than 10 seconds, and shorter if possible. It’s not your life story, but a pleasantry that also gives people just a little bit about who you are.
  • Make it fit. It should give people a hint of the cool stuff that you do (or, if you’re slogging it out in the hopes of doing cool stuff someday, the cool stuff that you intend to do.)
  • Show your benefits. Rather than simply give them your job title, tell them about a benefit that your work provides in a way that invites people to find out more. Susan RoAne likes to tell a story about someone she met whose one-liner was “I help rich people sleep at night”. That’s more interesting than “I’m a financial analyst”.

My intro at DevRelCon will be something along the lines of “I’m a rock and roll accordion player, but in my spare time, I do developer relations at NetFoundry!”

Have some “pocket stories” handy

Pocket stories are short, engaging, and easy-to-tell anecdote you keep ready for networking situations. They should be:

  • Brief: No more than a minute long; a minute and thirty seconds tops.
  • Relevant to DevRelCon or the people listening.

  • Open-ended, so listeners can respond or share their own experiences.

Here’s a tech-related pocket story:

“Last year I tried to refactor a core service during a two-week sprint. Halfway through, we realized we’d basically reinvented a library that already existed. The best part? We ended up contributing to that library instead, and now it’s in production at three other companies.”

“Local flavor” pocket stories are often a good conversation starter:

“This is my first time in Kansas City, and yesterday I went looking for barbecue. I asked a local for the ‘best’ spot… and ended up in a half-hour debate between two strangers about burnt ends. I still don’t know who won, but I definitely left full.”

Bring an interesting thing

We’re nerds! We love interesting gadgets, amusing tchotchkes, and funny techie T-shirts. They’re often interesting conversation-starters, and DevRelCon is the perfect environment for bringing them out!

Me? I’m bringing the accordion (of course).

The incredibly simple trick for instantly boosting your social confidence

Here’s the exercise: Before you leave to go to DevRelCon, find some text and read it out loud for three minutes. If for some reason you can’t find some text to read, use this article. You’ll find that it’s a self-confidence booster!

Even after DevRelCon has come and gone, do this exercise daily. Like any skill, frequent low-pressure practice builds familiarity, and if you read alound regularly, you’ll find yourself more comfortable when talking with strangers at networking events.

Choose something different to read out loud every day, and try emphasizing key parts of the text. If you’re reading something with dialogue, try expressing the emotion in that dialogue. If you listen to audiobooks or podcasts, try emulating the way audiobook narrators narrate their material.

Reading out loud boosts your confidence because:

  • It helps you get comfortable with your voice. Many people don’t like the sound of their own voice. Reading out loud gets you used to the sound of your voice, reducing any self-consciousness you may have about it. And when you’re comfortable with your voice, you’ll also be more comfortable speaking in social situations and making presentations.
  • Your speech will become more clear. The exercise of reading out loud forces you to articulate words clearly and speak at a steady pace. You’ll  also become more aware of your tone, rhythm, and pitch, so that you can adjust them to sound clear and confident, and mumble less.
  • It makes you more engaging. Read out loud with expression; it’ll give you practice with the kind of vocal variety and emphasis that keeps listeners interested in actual conversations.

At the conference (and conference events)

Use Inigo Montoya’s technique for introducing yourself

Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride had the perfect self-introduction. Use his technique for yourself!

Example: “Hi! I’m Joey de Villa. I’m giving the fun Python “choose your own adventure” game talk on Friday. How are you doing?”

Project good posture

Having a good posture is generally good for all sorts of health reasons, but at a conference, it has the additional benefit of showing confidence, competence, and alertness. And because the body is a self-feedback system, you’ll find yourself feeling more confident, competent, and alert.

The general guidance for standing up straight is to imagine a string pulling you gently upward from the crown of your head. Keep your spine straight, knees soft, and feet shoulder-width apart.

When you do this, people will be more likely to approach you because you appear open and self-assured instead of reluctant and uncertain.

The general advice is to put your shoulders back — but not too far back. Your shoulders should be below your ears. Drawing your shoulders back just slightly opens up your chest, which is body language for “Hello. My name in Inigo Montoya. I’m killin’ it here. Prepare to converse.” You’ll appear more engaged and ready to interact.

That’s so much better that the forward, rounded shoulders look, which says “I don’t want to be here, and I definitely don’t want to talk to you.” It makes you look defensive or distracted.

You might find it helpful to roll your shoulders up, back, and down, just enough to relax your chest.

Here’s a WikiHow exercise to help you stand up straight.

Engage with eye contact

Eye contact — it’s a tricky thing, especially among nerdy types, but is one of the strongest ways to build trust quickly. What better place to brush up on your eye contact technique than DevRelCon?

Here’s how you do it: when you meet someone, make eye contact by looking at them right at their eyes for a “one thousand one, one thousand two” count. That’s long enough to acknowledge them but not so long that it feels as though you’re staring them down.

If looking someone in the eyes isn’t your thing, try looking at some part of their face near their eyes, such as their forehead or cheek.

Done right, eye contact gives others a sense of warmth and attentiveness. It makes other people feel seen, which is crucial in noisy, crowded conference environments.

Find out more about eye contact here.

Allistic people — people who aren’t affected by autism — should be aware that people with autism find eye contact challenging. If you find that the person you’re talking to finds eye contact uncomfortable, look at their face, but not directly at their eyes (basically, use the trick I mentioned earlier).

How to join a conversation

You’ll probably see a group of people already engaged in a conversation. If this is your nightmare…

Click the screenshot to read the Onion article.

…here’s how you handle it:

  1. Pick a lively group of people you’d like to join in conversation. As people who are already in a conversation, they’ve already done some of the work for you. They’re lively, which makes it more likely that they’re open to people joining in. They’ve also picked a topic, which saves you the effort of having to come up with one. It also lets you decide whether or not it interests you. If they’re lively and their topic of conversation interests you, proceed to step 2. If not, go find another group!
  2. Stand on the periphery and look interested. Just do it. This is a conference, and one of the attendees’ goals is to meet people. Smile. Pipe in if you have something to contribute; people here are pretty cool about that.
  3. When acknowledged, step into the group. You’re in like Flynn! Step in confidently and introduce yourself. If you’ve got that one-line summary of who you are that I talked about earlier, now’s the time to use it.
  4. Don’t force a change of subject. You’ve just joined the convo, and you’re not campaigning. Contribute, and let the subject changes come naturally.

Feel free to join me in at any conversational circle I’m in! I always keep an eye on the periphery for people who want to join in, and I’ll invite them.

Observe, ask, reveal

In her book How to Work a Room, Susan RoAne talks about a conversation tool she refers to as “Observe, Ask, Reveal” or “OAR,” which is a way to make interactions feel more natural and engaging. It’s made up of three steps:

  1. Observe. Notice something about the person you’re talking to, their surroundings, or the situation. This could be as simple as their choice of drink, something they’re carrying, or something happening in the room.

  2. Ask. Follow your observation with a genuine, open-ended question. This invites the other person to share and keeps the conversation flowing.

  3. Reveal. Share a little about yourself related to the topic, which helps build rapport and makes the exchange feel balanced rather than like an interrogation.

    ⚠️ Don’t overshare! TMI often backfires. Also, don’t overdo it with the questions — it should feel like a conversation, not an interrogation.

The idea behind OAR is to create an easy rhythm between listening and contributing to the conversation.

Be more of a host and less of a guest

No, you don’t have to worry about scheduling or if the coffee urns are full. By “being a host,” I mean doing some of things that hosts do, such as introducing people, saying “hello” to wallflowers and generally making people feel more comfortable.

Being graceful to everyone is not only good karma, but it’s a good way to promote yourself. It worked out really well for me — when I first moved to Tampa, I simply attended events and helped out where I could, lending a hand at meetups. I gained a reputation for being helpful and knowledgable, which led me to being invited to speak at events, and I also wound up inheriting a couple of meetups as well!

Use social media

Follow the DevRelCon hashtag — the official one is  — to find out what’s going on, and to find and connect with attendees online.

Advice for lunch

Lunch at DevRelCon is a great opportunity to meet people! Here are some tips for lunch…

1. Choose your table with intention

  • Arrive early if possible. This gives you more freedom to choose your spot.

  • Look for tables with a mix of people already seated and empty chairs. It’s easier to integrate into an existing conversation than to start from scratch with a fully empty table.

2. Use OAR (“observe, ask, reveal”) to break the ice

Follow the “observe, ask, reveal” conversational framework I wrote about earlier to talk to people at the table.

Example: “I see you got the DevRelCon hoodie — did you brave the merch line this morning?”

3. Introduce yourself to your immediate neighbors first

  • Turn to the people on your left and right, give your name, where you’re from, and a quick “pocket story” or conference-related detail.

  • Then, when there’s a pause in the group’s conversation, introduce yourself to the whole table. This makes you seem approachable, and you’re not barging into the conversation.

4. Keep the conversation inclusive

  • If you notice someone at the table isn’t speaking much, pull them in by looping back to them with a related question.

  • Avoid overly niche technical deep dives unless everyone’s into it.

5. Have a graceful exit

  • When lunch is wrapping up, thank the table for the conversation.

  • Swap contact details or LinkedIn with anyone you clicked with.

  • Mention to people at the table that you might see them in another session. If you know what sessions you’re attending after lunch, let them know!

Advice for social events

Try these out at Thursday’s attendee party, as well as at DevRelCon’ other social events, including the karaoke event (taking place Thursday at 9:00 p.m. in the back room on the ground floor of the AC Hotel):

  1. Beware of “rock piles”. Rock piles are groups of people huddled together in a closed formation. It sends the signal “go away”. If you find yourself in one, try to position yourself to open up the formation.
  2. Beware of “hotboxing”. I’ve heard this term used in counter-culture settings, but in this case “hotboxing” means to square your shoulders front-and-center to the person you’re talking to. It’s a one-on-one version of the rock pile, and it excludes others from joining in. Once again, the cure for hotboxing is to change where you’re standing to allow more people to join in.
  3. Put your stuff down. Carrying your bag or other stuff is a non-verbal cue that you’re about to leave. If you’re going to stay and chat, put them down. When you’re about to leave, take your stuff and start saying your goodbyes.
  4. Save the email, texts, and social media posts for later, unless they’re important.They’ll draw your attention away from the room and also send the message “go away.”

After the conference

1. Organize your contacts soon after the conference

  • Review any business cards, LinkedIn connections, or conference app contacts you collected. Strike while the iron is hot — do this by the end of the following week!

  • Tag or note:

    • How you met

    • What you talked about

    • Any action items (e.g., “Send them article on API security”)

This makes your outreach to people feel more personal and less generic and spammy.

2. Send a brief, specific follow-up

  • Timing: ideally within 3 days of the conference.

  • Keep it short, but reference something from your conversation to jog their memory.

Example: “Great chatting with you at the DevRelCon lunch table about AI security. Here’s that GitHub repo I mentioned.”

3. Continue the conversation

  • Share a useful resource, article, or code snippet related to what you discussed.

  • Offer help or collaboration, even if it’s small. This shifts you from a “one-time meet” to a peer in their network.

4. Connect on the right channels

  • LinkedIn for professional connections and ongoing career updates.

  • GitHub for technical/code collaboration.

  • Twitter/X or Mastodon if you connected over shared interests in tech culture, events, or industry news.

5. Keep the relationship warm

  • Interact with their posts, star or fork their repos, or comment thoughtfully on something they’ve shared.

  • When you come across a relevant opportunity, event, or resource, send it their way with a short note.

6. Build a “conference alumni” list

  • Keep a lightweight spreadsheet or note with names, contact info, and event details.

  • Before your next DevRelCon (or other conference), skim this list so you can reconnect with past contacts.

Categories
Conferences Developer Relations What I’m Up To

My talk next week at DevRelCon NYC 2026: “The Market is Trying to Tell You Something”

I don’t think I’ve ever put in as much work into a talk as I have for my upcoming talk at DevRelCon NYC 2026 (that’s “DevRelCon” as in “developer relations conference”), The Market is Trying to Tell You Something. It’s a lightning talk meant to fill up no more that 10 minutes including Q&A and the transition between talks, but the ratio of hours-of-prep to minutes-of-actual-talk is massive.

What is DevRelCon?

DevlRelCon NYC 2026 logo
DevRelCon NYC 2026 takes place July 22 – 23 at Industry City, Brooklyn, New York.

DevRelCon is the long-running conference series for people who do developer relations/developer advocacy, which once upon a time also went by “developer evangelism”. This line of work involves helping software developers discover, understand, and actually stick with a product, whether that’s through a combination documentation, demos, community, and developer experience.

DevRelCon was created by the developer relations agency Hoopy and began in London in 2015. It’s since grown into an international series of conferences with editions in London, Prague, San Francisco, Tokyo, China, Latin America, and online. I’m speaking at the New York 2026 edition, which is organized by Mike Swift and Major League Hacking, the global community for early-career developers and software creators.

DevRelCon is positioned as the premier conference for anyone working to grow developer adoption, spanning developer relations, developer experience, product marketing, platform product management, and everyone’s favorite three-letter acronym, GTM. In other words, it’s a room full of exactly the people my talk is about, which is either the best or the most terrifying possible audience for a talk on what the DevRel job market is really telling us. (Probably both.)

Joey de Villa’s NetFoundry business card
My business card. Click to see at full size.

DevRelCon NYC 2026 will take place July 22 – 23 at Industry City, Brooklyn, New York. It is the first conference I’m speaking at as an official representative of NetFoundry.

What’s The Market is Trying to Tell You Something all about?

Arms in Christmas sweaters toasting with cans of beer under a Christmas wreath
Join me at the DevRelCon afterparty and I’ll tell you the Christmas Eve “homework assignment” story over a beer.

The talk is based on my experiences in 2025, when I did something I don’t recommend as a hobby but made for a great natural experiment: I let the DevRel job market interview me a couple dozen times. That’s my dressed-up way of saying “I was looking for a job”.

I went through recruiter screens, faced hiring panels, did take-home demos (one on Christmas Eve, based on the urging of a recruiter), and went through final rounds — across AI-native startups, enterprise infrastructure shops, and everything in between.

Somewhere around the tenth interview, I stopped just trying to get hired and started noticing a pattern:

  • Job descriptions had quietly rewritten themselves.
  • Interviews are testing for things the job description never mentions.
  • And “DevRel ROI”, which used to be a phrase that was thrown in with an accompanying hand-wave, now means something specific that it didn’t mean in the zero-interest 2010s or the Great Resignation hiring frenzy of a couple years ago.

My talk is my attempt to decode those signals: what the market is actually screening for, how what it says and what it wants are often different, and what any of us (whether you’re job-hunting, hiring, or just trying to make sure your role survives its next budget review) should do about it. It’s eight minutes. There will be an accordion. That’s all I’ll say for now.

Categories
Conferences Developer Relations What I’m Up To

I’m speaking at DevRelCon NYC 2026 (July 22 – 23 in Brooklyn)!

DevRelCon NYC is the developer relations conference for North America, it’s happening in Brooklyn on July 22 and 23, and I’m a speaker!

Here’s a quick writeup of my talk, as it appears on the schedule:

The Market is Trying to Tell You Something

The DevRel job market has been sending signals for two years. Most of us have been too busy surviving it to read them. After 15+ years in Developer Relations and a recent job search that took me across a couple dozen companies, I came away with both a new role and something just as valuable: a pattern.

Job descriptions have quietly shifted. Hiring panels are asking different questions. “DevRel ROI” means something specific now that it didn’t mean in the zero-interest 2010s or the Great Resignation era of a couple of years ago. The skills companies say they want versus the skills that actually get you hired don’t look like they come from the same list.

This talk is an honest, experience-based, practitioner-level read of what the market is telling us about where DevRel is headed. It doesn’t have any LinkedIn takes or recycled frameworks; just patterns from the front lines, with implications for how you position yourself, make the case for your team, and think about the next few years of your career.

In addition to giving a talk, I’ll be there to learn as well as represent NetFoundry.

DevRelCon typically brings in about 300 attendees, mostly professionals from developer relations, developer experience, and developer community-building roles to discuss industry trends, methodology, and as of late, AI integration, as well as to do some networking (a key part of DevRel).

DevRelCon was created by the developer relations agency Hoopy and began in London in 2015. DevRelCon NYC is organized by Mike Swift and Major League Hacking, a global community for early-career developers and software creators, of which Mike is co-founder.

DevRelCon NYC takes place on Wednesday, July 22 and Thursday, July 23 at Industry City in Brooklyn, New York. I’m arriving early in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 21 and will be attending some of the pre-DevRelCon festivities.

Last year’s DevRelCon NYC talks

Here’s the set of DevRelCon NYC 2025 talks that have been posted to YouTube. I’m using these as a guide for my own talk (as well as for ideas for my own developer relations work at NetFoundry), and you might find these helpful for your own work, or to help you decide if DevRelCon NYC 2026 is for you!