In technology companies, AI is already going beyond the trend and influencing products, engineering, and daily business processes. Along with opportunities come challenges: working with sensitive data, security requirements, and the complexity of integration into existing systems. In such conditions, it is important to understand where AI really creates value and where it just adds noise. During the discussion, participants share their practical experience: how they implement AI in their products, adapt engineering processes, and restructure operations for new tools. This is a conversation about real pain points, opportunities, and solutions that help teams move forward.

How to build your own environment for generative AI in a matter of hours — from idea to working solution? During the presentation, the De Novo team will share their practical experience in creating a controlled environment for GenAI, talk about architecture, security approach, and real-life use cases in Ukrainian companies.

The pink dream of many designers — to “escape” from freelance or outsource and finally join a product team. Let’s figure out whether being a product designer is really that cool, what skill set it actually requires, and whether it might lead to professional stagnation instead of growth.

In just 20 minutes, Serhii Saraychikov, founder of A42 and one of Prozorro’s top white-hat hackers, will show why 80% of attacks begin with ordinary information gathering about your company. You’ll learn which common mistakes open the door to breaches, how automated systems find your weak spots faster than your teams, and how to build asset monitoring that actually prevents leaks. This is a must-see for CTOs who want to view their infrastructure through an attacker’s eyes and get a ready-to-use risk-control strategy without unnecessary costs.

As the team grows, products multiply, and the engineering organization evolves - the CTO role often shifts from a technical leader to a manager staring at spreadsheets and dashboards. And that’s when it becomes truly challenging: to stay in the technical loop, remain close to the architecture and systems, and keep a real sense of what’s happening on the ground. In this talk, I’ll share my experience on how to stay a Hands-on CTO - maintaining deep technical understanding, influencing architecture, and scaling the company at the same time, without losing touch with the code and core systems. Key topics we’ll cover: - How the CTO role evolves as the company grows - from coder to system-level leader. - The most common traps: loss of architectural memory, disconnect between business and engineering, dependency on a few key people. - Healthy habits that help keep technical context: code reviews, architecture stand-ups, "walk the code" sessions, CTO R&D sprints. - Decision-making systems: how ADRs and RFCs help maintain clarity and traceability. - Communication with tech leads: building effective 1:1s, technical syncs, and knowledge-sharing loops. - Tools and platforms that preserve context - dashboards, monitoring systems, and architecture reviews.

Being a team lead is like piloting a spaceship where every crew member has their own temperament and trajectory. The DISC model is your GPS that helps you avoid burning up in the atmosphere of “storming” and guides your team into the stable orbit of “performing.”

Innovative cyber threats require CTO to adopt innovative approaches to response and counteraction. The development of the darknet as a marketplace for compromised credentials necessitates the implementation of new protection methods. We will discuss authorization security in SaaS services. I will talk about current threats, how 2FA can protect against the use of leaked data, what to do if cookies are compromised along with session tokens, and we will look at cases where darknet monitoring automation helps CTOs ensure the security of not only their own products, but also third-party supply chain services (Slack, GitLab, Jira, CRM), partners, C-level executives, and so on.

A mistake during an interview can either become a reason to laugh — or cost you an offer. I invite you to take a closer look at both the obvious and hidden mistakes that candidates often make before, during, and after a technical interview. I can’t promise you’ll stop making them instantly after my talk — but you’ll definitely start noticing them.

We are used to trusting our feelings: it seems that the processes are working and the product is of high quality. But feelings cannot be scaled. In this report, I will show how we moved from intuitive decisions to a system of metrics that measures the quality of products and processes in real time. How teams, with a “dashboard,” manage the development of their products in terms of quality. And most importantly, how technical metrics become understandable to the business, help to talk about risks in one language, and make decisions on a large scale.

Every engineer has their own path in IT. Mine didn’t start with polished presentations or clear plans — it started with me being lifted by a crane to fix a screen at the Metalist Stadium. Then came telecom projects, autotests, Red Hat, OpenStack, OpenShift — and a constant search for where to move next. Over time, the rough scripts I wrote just to save myself a few hours started holding production systems together. “Fires” turned into opportunities for new solutions, and experiments became experience that truly worked. And somewhere along the way, there were moments when I wanted to leave IT. But instead, DevOps01 appeared — then a community, and eventually AWS and HashiCorp ambassadorships. In this talk, I’ll share how the ongoing search for myself in the profession — and for the profession within myself — became the driving force that changed not only my career but also my life. How small initiatives grow into big systems, and how the community opens new doors.