Not every talk at a tech conference is about frameworks and architecture. Some are about how a team actually works: how you hire, how you give feedback, how you manage code quality when AI agents have multiplied the volume of everything. At Codemotion Milan 2026, there are at least five sessions built for anyone who leads or works in a dev team and wants to leave with something concrete — not slides, but real changes.
5 talks to put on your agenda
1. How to hire a developer in the AI era — Dennis Nerush, Director of AI Engineering @ Elementor
Dennis has spent 15 years building tech teams across companies and startups, mentoring over 100 managers. As Director of AI Engineering at Elementor, he redesigned his hiring process from scratch after realizing that interviewing developers as if coding assistants didn’t exist no longer made any sense.
Talk: How to Interview Engineers in the AI Era: What I Changed and What Actually Works
💡 Why you shouldn’t miss it: Coding assistants generate solutions in seconds. Candidates walk into interviews with powerful tools in their hands. Yet most companies still evaluate engineers exactly the way they did ten years ago. After hundreds of interviews, Dennis changed his approach: he no longer tests what a candidate can write, but how they reason, how they collaborate with AI, and how they behave when AI gets it wrong. A practical talk for anyone who hires, anyone job hunting, and anyone leading a dev team.
2. The feedback you can’t bring yourself to give outside the PR — Abiodun Olowode, CTO & Co-Founder @ Metrifox
Abiodun leads the engineering team at Metrifox with a clear focus: reducing technical debt, building reusable abstractions, and — above all — creating cultures where excellence is the norm, not the exception. He writes and speaks regularly about the uncomfortable parts of engineering leadership.
Talk: We Review Code. Why Won’t We Review Each Other?
💡 Why you shouldn’t miss it: Surgical comments on PRs, total silence in standups and design reviews. Sound familiar? This talk explores why developers avoid difficult conversations outside the code — and how to develop the ability to have them, clearly and constructively, without becoming the person nobody wants on the team.
3. The creator of Kotlin on the future of the programmer — Andrey Breslav, Founder @ CodeSpeak
Andrey created Kotlin and led its development at JetBrains from zero to millions of users. Today he’s the founder of CodeSpeak, working on spec-based AI coding solutions. Few people in the world can speak about the future of programming with this combination of hands-on experience and structural vision.
Talk: Future of Programming: What’s Our Place in the World of Coding Machines?
💡 Why you shouldn’t miss it: The question is simple and uncomfortable: if agents can plan, write, review, and test code, what’s left for developers? Andrey doesn’t answer with reassurances — he answers from the experience of someone who built one of the world’s most widely used languages and now works every day at the boundary between human programmers and machines. The kind of talk you leave with a different perspective.
4. Why coding agents need you more than ever — Alfonso Fuggetta, Full Professor @ Politecnico di Milano
Alfonso is a full professor at Politecnico di Milano, former CEO and Scientific Director of Cefriel, former Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Ferrari, and Visiting Professor at NTNU, CU Boulder, and UC Irvine. For thirty years he has worked at the intersection of software research, industry, and innovation. He ranks in the top 2% of researchers worldwide according to the Elsevier/Stanford index.
Talk: Why Coding Agents Need You More Than Ever
💡 Why you shouldn’t miss it: The hype says the developer is finished. The skeptics say it’s just autocomplete. Both positions are comfortable and wrong. Alfonso dismantles both with rigor: an LLM has no internal reference for correctness, no understanding of the domain it’s building in, no memory between sessions. Bridging that structural gap requires method, judgment, and engineering depth — exactly what agents can’t have. A talk that flips the current narrative.
5. Why a single line of defense isn’t enough for your PRs — Vladi Stevanovic, Director of Community @ Multiplayer
Vladi has 10+ years of experience building developer communities and enablement programs. He led customer success at Prisma and MongoDB, with a focus on system design, distributed systems, and observability. Today as Director of Community at Multiplayer he works daily with the real problems facing engineering teams.
Talk: The Swiss Cheese Fix: Why PR Quality Needs Layers
💡 Why you shouldn’t miss it: PRs sitting in queue for days. Reviewers scrolling through 500-line diffs. Rubber-stamped approvals on code nobody really understood. Then AI agents arrived and multiplied the volume, making the problem unsustainable. Vladi introduces the Swiss cheese model applied to code quality: no single layer is perfect, but enough imperfect layers build a more reliable system than any single component ever could. A concrete mental framework for teams ready to stop patching and start building.
These talks are at Codemotion Milano 2026
Whether you’re a developer, tech lead, engineering manager, or CTO, the Codemotion Milano 2026 program goes well beyond these five sessions — covering AI, cloud, distributed systems, security, performance, and a community of professionals to connect with in person.
👉 Explore the full program →
