· 2 min read
DevFest Florida Speaker Spotlight for Nov 2026
We are excited to spotlight the incredible lineup of innovators, engineers, and community leaders taking the stage at DevFest Florida this year. From deep dives into artificial intelligence to modern web architecture, these industry experts are ready to share the real-world insights driving the tech landscape forward.
Javiera Laso
Lead developer consultant
Thoughtworks
Build Your Own AI-Assisted Architecture Review Board
Architecture Review Boards are meant to improve consistency, reduce risk, and help teams make better technical decisions. In practice, they can also become slow, centralized, and difficult to scale.
In this hands-on workshop, participants will design a lightweight AI-assisted Architecture Review Board that brings architectural standards, ADRs, engineering principles, system constraints, and organizational knowledge directly into the decision process.
I’ll share how I use AI in my own architecture practice to structure analysis, surface relevant standards, explore alternatives, challenge assumptions, and expose trade-offs. Participants will then apply those ideas to build their own review workflow.
We’ll work through a realistic architectural decision and define what an AI-assisted review should evaluate, what context it needs, what questions it should ask, and when a decision should still require human review or escalation.
The goal is not to automate architecture governance. It is to make architectural guidance more accessible, consistent, and scalable while preserving the judgment and accountability of engineers and architects.
By the end of the workshop, participants will leave with a practical blueprint for an Architecture Review Board they can adapt to their own organization, standards, and level of governance maturity.
Carol Bolger
Founder / Flutter & AI Consultant
Ask My Data: Building Grounded Gemini Agents with Flutter & Firebase
Most AI agents lean on one deceptively simple trick to be useful: grounding. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll build a Flutter chat app where Gemini answers questions using your own live Firestore data instead of guessing — the same function-calling pattern behind real agentic apps. Along the way, you’ll set up a Firebase project from scratch (free, no credit card required), learn what Firestore, Authentication, and Firebase AI Logic actually do, and wire them into a working Flutter app. You’ll leave with a template you can immediately re-skin and extend for your hackathon project this weekend, plus a real mental model for grounding an LLM in data instead of letting it hallucinate.
Learn more at DevFestFlorida.com
