SPEAKER
Chad Fowler
CTO & GP · BlueYard
Chad Fowler is a technologist, author, and investor dedicated to rethinking how we build and sustain software. As a Partner and CTO at BlueYard Capital, Chad is currently at the forefront of the AI-native development movement. He is the architect behind the "Phoenix Architecture"—a philosophy that software should be designed for rapid replacement rather than long-term maintenance. A foundational figure in the Ruby and Rails communities, Chad co-founded Ruby Central and authored the industry classic The Passionate Programmer. Before joining BlueYard, he served as the CTO of Wunderlist (acquired by Microsoft) and later as a General Manager at Microsoft. When not nerding out on the future of engineering, Chad is a prolific jazz saxophonist, recently releasing his 2026 album, Memphis Mandala.
Upcoming sessions
See complete program3 November
2:35 PM · 30 min
An Architectural Approach to Regenerative Software
Phoenix Architecture is a way of thinking about software in a world where implementations can be rewritten faster than they can be understood. As AI shifts the economics from maintenance to regeneration, the real architectural questions move upstream: what must remain stable, what can safely change, and what breaks humans when it breaks at all. This talk offers a set of lenses (not answers) for reasoning about durability, trust, and coherence in long-lived systems. Attendees should leave with new instincts, sharper questions, and a sense that some of our deepest assumptions about software may need to be revisited.
