This week I did something uncomfortably exciting: I gave a talk at the Rockstars Valley conference about evals and how we’re using them at Rabobank to build useful and trustworthy AI solutions.
The next day I gave a keynote at Frontmania. That talk was about the creative things I like to build with code, but also how AI is changing that for me and what that means for my skills and creativity. I also talked about the work Rabobank is doing with agentic coding and why I’m betting on a future where engineers are not replaced but enhanced by AI.
This is me struggling with the technical difficulties at the start of my Frontmania keynote. Even that taught me something new: how to stay calm for 10 minutes with nothing to say while a room full of people is looking expectantly at me. I'm glad it worked out in the end and I was still able to tell my story. Someone even described it as "handling the technical difficulties with grace" in the feedback. Nice to know it looked that way from the audience.
The audience rated the talk 4.8 out of 5 across 30 evaluations, compared with a conference average of 4.32. I'm really happy with that, especially after such a difficult start. One comment picked out exactly what I hoped people would take away: "enhance instead of replace humans & do not outsource the fun". That's also what makes building things with AI interesting to me: finding out what we can create with it, while keeping the parts we enjoy doing ourselves.
Looking forward to my next uncomfortably exciting thing.