WWT Goes to KCDC 2026

Every year, some of the best enterprise developers in the world find themselves in downtown Kansas City, MO for the Kansas City Developers Conference. With international speakers, companies from all walks of tech and attendees from just down the street and continents away, 2026 proved to be another great event!

This year WWT was able to get in on the action with two people delivering three talks! Our Technical Solutions Architects Jeremy Meiss and PJ Hagerty were in KC to talk about modern Dev and DevOps practices and tooling while learning what the modern enterprise developer is looking for.

Taking the stage

After a day of workshops, Jeremy took the stage with his talk Don't Panic: The Real Data Behind AI-assisted Software Development. In the talk, he  cut through a year of AI hype and analyzed the actual data from industry surveys and real developer workflow analysis to answer the question: is AI actually making software delivery better, and for whom? The talk discussed how AI functions as an amplifier, not a fix - making strong engineering organizations stronger and struggling ones worse - and discussed where the bottlenecks currently are and what to do about them now. Check out his blog post for more information.

While there, PJ had conversations around the venue ranging in topics from modern Open Source Software in the age of Large Language Models to what makes sense when considering code produced by agents and the safety of our data.

Later in the afternoon, Jeremy did another presentation on  The Practical Blueprint for Shipping AI that Makes it to Production – something on the mind of many of the attendees as their varied AI journey continues. In his talk, he discussed the data around why most AI projects never make it to production, and then went on to identify the deployment, retrieval and orchestration patterns that the major cloud providers all align around. He then walked through a few of the engineering disciplines that separate AI systems that ship from the ones that stall out, with the crux being the application of decades-old software assumptions to a system that doesn't follow them. He followed it up with this blog post which dives a bit deeper.

PJ's talk Friday focused on developer tools and the mixing in of AI as the latest tool in the developer's toolbox. Why Developer Tools Still Matter is a presentation focusing on understanding how developer tools help, not simply using them, is more important than ever. This education on dev tools is often overlooked in the modern AI world.

What we learned

While delivering talks was the main focus it was also an opportunity to gather feedback and learn more about what developers hope for in the current tech scene. Ranging from discussions on AI/LLM hype versus what was being delivered, many folks seemed to long for a singular voice of truth for tools and techniques on what works best.

For many attendees, seeing what various parts of the community were taking advantage of in the AI world was part of the agenda, but there was an air of reluctance at accepting the standard "AI can solve all problems" marketing rhetoric. Many developers have found code assistants helpful but the reported use of them overstated, not buying into the "no one needs to write code" idea. Additionally, quite a few were excited by the idea of Agentic AI, but felt the actual performance gains being reported fell short of their practical experience.

Outside of AI, Open Source was still a highly considered topic and there was a great deal of discussion around how these two worlds worked together. In the wake of talks focusing on various programming languages and their role in the AI world, many folks were left happy to have learned and upskilled to a point where their individual journey could progress.

Final thoughts

KCDC is a great event and WWT was lucky to be a part of it this year. We look forward to future participation, both on the stage and in the crowds.