Outline — Welcome to AI Native DevCon

Speaker

Simon Maple — Head of Developer Relations at Tessl; co-host of AI Native Dev. Previously Field CTO and VP DevRel at Snyk, ZeroTurnaround, and IBM. Java Champion (2014), JavaOne Rockstar (2014, 2017), Duke's Choice winner, founder of Virtual JUG, co-leader of the London Java Community.

Abstract

Not provided. [inferred]: The opening session of AI Native DevCon — conference logistics, app onboarding, schedule overview, the session-skill recording pipeline, and Simon's closing challenge to attendees.

Thesis

A conference is only as valuable as what attendees do with it. Simon frames AI Native DevCon as a gathering of like-minded "agentic developers" and argues the highest-value time is the hallway track — connecting with peers who are weeks ahead or behind you on the same journey — operationalized through three concrete challenges to take home.

Section TOC

Terminology glossary (speaker's own definitions)

• Hallway track — "a hallway track is exactly that. It's the track outside of sessions... some people say the most valuable piece of a conference is outside of the session talking to the speakers, talking to other people."
• Session skill — every session is transcribed via Granola, and "as soon as Granola finishes that recording, we actually create a skill" — an agentic skill uploaded to the AI Native DevCon 2026 workspace in Tessl, downloadable into Claude, Codex, etc.
• Context window (the track) — the main room where the opening is being held; Simon jokes that "when the context window gets very very full, we do do compaction... it will happen at a very awkward time and you will lose all memory of everything that happened in that session."
• Agentic developers / AI-native developers — "people who wants to learn about how we can really improve get the most out of our software development workflows and processes. Using agentic methods."

Named frameworks / concepts

1. The Three-Part Attendee Challenge (during the conference)
   • Talk with three people you haven't talked with before (Simon doesn't count)
   • Identify three topics at the conference you want to research / build on
   • Join the AI Native Dev Discord community
2. The End-of-Week Follow-Up Rule
   • By the end of the week, take the most important of those topics, kick it off, and try to get some work done by the weekend
   • Share progress in the Discord — "If you leave it, it typically typically won't get done."
3. Three Tracks Named for LLM Concepts — Context Window, Latent Space, Tool Pool
4. Transcript-to-Skill Pipeline — Granola records → skill auto-generated → uploaded to Tessl workspace → attendees download into their agent of choice and query the conference

Open questions / not covered

• The actual content of any session (this is purely the opening — no technical material)
• Specific session times or speaker names beyond Guy Podjarny (next up) and "a wonderful beginner from Thoughtworks" (day-two keynote)
• The full correct list of sponsors (transcript shows speech-to-text mangling: "Neo", "SLEEP", "Paper Compute", "Code", "Resolute", "Autonomy AI", "Resync", "Cogirant", "AnyShift")
• The Code of Respect's actual contents — only its existence and that Samantha is the conference lead
• Pricing, attendance numbers, or any business detail about Tessl

Note on transcript quality

The transcript is a raw speech-to-text dump with no speaker labels and several mangled proper nouns: "Tessell" likely = Tessl, "Geico" / "guideposts" likely = Guy / Guy Podjarny's, "kilo" likely = keynote, "a wonderful beginner" likely = a wonderful beginner-misheard speaker name from Thoughtworks. Preserve verbatim when quoting; flag the artifact if it matters.