Jafar Rezaei is a Fullstack Software Engineer at HEMA with 15+ years of experience in software development, architecture, and infrastructure. He is passionate about DevOps, developer experience, open source, and emerging AI technologies. Jafar is the author of three books and has delivered 15+ technical talks and presentations to developer communities and industry audiences. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Oh My Harness! — The Missing Layer Between You and Your AI Agent 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: What happens when you give an AI agent more than a prompt? The answer is a harness—a layer of tools, context, workflows, guardrails, and feedback loops that turns an LLM into a capable engineering agent. In this talk, we’ll explore the emerging world of AI harnesses, how companies are adopting them, and why the harness may matter more than the model itself when building reliable AI-powered workflows.

Software engineer at IBM and conference speaker. I work with Java and currently contribute to several Quarkus extensions. I also participate in other open-source projects such as Dekorate and SmallRye Stork. I'm passionate about open source, best practices, and developer experience. I've spoken at Devoxx UK, Devoxx FR, Codemotion, JBCNConf, and Commit. I'm also part of the Madrid JUG team and an advocate for women in tech. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: A few things I'd do if I wanted to modernize my Java application in 2026 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Migrations are a universal pain in the Java world and it's not just about switching frameworks. Upgrading from Spring Boot 2 to 3, moving from Java EE to Jakarta EE, adopting a newer JDK, the pattern is always the same: it's manual, it's error-prone, it's expensive, and it's hard to estimate upfront. So teams defer it, and technical debt keeps growing. Our belief is that modernizing Java applications should not be a difficult project, it should be the standard path. And the way to get there is tooling that makes migrations easy, predictable, and low-risk. In this talk, I'll share a practical, layered approach to Java modernization that combines three things: choosing a modern target without forcing a day-one rewrite, automating every transformation that has a deterministic rule, and bringing in AI where automation runs out of answers. I'll show how deterministic tooling and AI agents complement each other and why giving an agent structured migration knowledge is fundamentally different from asking an LLM to rewrite your code. You'll see real tools, real migrations, and real results. While the first focus is Spring Boot to Quarkus, the approach applies more broadly to anyone staring at a Java application that needs to move forward.

Maish Saidel-Keesing is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS with 20+ years of hands-on development and infrastructure experience. He doesn't just talk about technology, he builds with it. From scalable architectures to serverless solutions, he brings real-world insights that resonate with engineers tackling similar challenges daily. Maish is passionate about equipping developers with practical strategies for leveraging GenAI in their workflows, automating infrastructure, and adopting DevOps practices that accelerate delivery. His mission: help developers build anything they can imagine in the cloud. 𝗦𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝘁𝗹𝗲: Nobody Told My Agents to Agree With Each Other 𝗦𝘆𝗻𝗼𝗽𝘀𝗶𝘀: Ever watched a multi-agent system nail testing then fall apart in production? Coordinating autonomous agents is one of the hardest problems in applied AI, and most teams end up writing fragile orchestration code that breaks under real conditions. This session covers battle-tested patterns for agent coordination, shared context, and debuggable interactions, with live demos of model-driven orchestration replacing weeks of brittle workflow code. Walk away with working patterns and monitoring strategies for production.

𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿: Bogdan is one of the co-founders of Code for Romania and he is currently one of the Technology Officers that help in coordinating the project teams and in delivering the civic apps the organization’s volunteers are working on. Having over 10 years of experience in .net, flavoring from version 2.0 in a POS Windows application, to multi-tenant Azure enterprise solutions, Bogdan is also a Technical Team Lead for a technology company whenever he is not managing the coding teams in the biggest civic tech ONG in Romania.