Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

Software engineering can no longer mean operating in "ticket-taker" mode—passively implementing specs in isolation. As the traditional Venn diagram of code, product, and design increasingly converges, engineers who can comfortably navigate that overlap become exponentially more impactful teammates.
AI isn’t just an autocomplete tool; it is the ultimate lever to help you take on those broader responsibilities without burning out.
This session cuts through the high-level hype to look at how AI actually changes a developer's daily workflow. We will cover how to use AI as a strategic sounding board—whether you are debugging complex systems, building new full-stack features, or navigating architectural trade-offs. You will learn how to automate the repetitive parts of development while maintaining strict code quality, freeing you up to focus on the overall product vision and user impact.

Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology is everywhere: your credit card, hotel room keys, smart phones, and your office badge, but not all NFC is created equal. Some NFC protocols have security vulnerabilities that have been known about for years and are trivial to exploit. The worst part? They are still widely used. This talk will explore two protocols with known vulnerabilities, demonstrate how easily these exploits can be performed, and provide suggestions for how you can protect yourself.

Every growing company buys its way out of hard problems. You're small, the roadmap is long, and a small SaaS contract buys you a year of engineering time. That's the right call, until it isn't.

This talk is a field report on one of those inflection points. Courtyard is a marketplace for physical collectibles, and for years our search was powered by a third-party vendor. It worked, until it became a liability. Costs rose, latency kept increasing, support was hard to come by. With AI agents becoming more capable, we were tempted to build a replacement. In this session, we'll cover the decision, what implementation looked like, how maintenance has proven to be after the fact, and what it's taught us about using AI in software development moving forward.