🚀 Join Us at the DevFest Florida 2026 Hackathon 🎉

Central Florida tech community, the countdown is officially on! ⏳

In just 6 days, we kick off the DevFest Florida Hackathon 2026 at the UCF Downtown Campus — Communication and Media Building (CMB), Room CMB 182A/B in Orlando! 🌴✨

Whether you write code daily, design intuitive interfaces, guide product vision, or build immersive game worlds—this weekend is for you. DevFest isn’t about non-stop, sleep-deprived grinds; it’s a high-energy celebration of innovation, learning, human-centered technology, and what we can create right here in Central Florida. 🤝💡

👉 Register for DevFest Florida 2026 on Eventbrite Now!

🎙️ Keynote Spotlight: Larry Kilroy (VP of Technology, DataKind)

We are thrilled to welcome Larry Kilroy, Vice President of Technology at DataKind, as our 2026 Keynote Speaker! 🌍✨

With over two decades of technical leadership building high-impact data systems, Larry sits at the forefront of applying data science, cloud architectures, and machine learning to address urgent humanitarian and civic challenges.

Keynote Themes & What to Expect:

🤝 AI & Data Science for Public Good: Moving past tech for tech’s sake—how engineers, designers, and data professionals can address real-world community, educational, and social inequities.
🏗️ Open Technology & Data Infrastructure: Building scalable, secure, and open architectures that empower civic organizations, schools, and non-profits without vendor lock-in.
⚖️ Responsible AI & Data Maturity: Practical frameworks for deploying ethical, human-in-the-loop models that minimize bias and deliver measurable, grassroots impact.

Larry’s talk sets the stage and vision for everything we’re building over the weekend—especially as you brainstorm concepts for your hackathon projects!

🌟 Featured Speakers & Workshops: Learn from the Best

Level up your toolkit with hands-on sessions and deep dives led by top engineering leaders throughout the weekend:

🤖 Arthur Thompson (Google): Building AI apps from scratch with the Google ecosystem — Discover how modern builders orchestrate agents and cloud services to ship software fast.
📱 Carol Bolger (Real World Applications): Ask My Data: Building Grounded Gemini Agents with Flutter & Firebase — Learn hands-on how to eliminate hallucinations with live Firestore data.
🛠️ Will Gorman (Nucleus Security): Agentic Engineering Workshop — Dive into autonomous agent skills and the evolving software lifecycle.
👓 Dwane Hemmings (Vonage): WebXR: Augment Reality with Real-time Communications — Build next-gen interactive AR experiences for headsets and smart glasses.
📐 Loiane Groner (BNY) & Javiera Laso (Thoughtworks): Discover Specs-Driven Development, feedback loops, and AI-assisted Architecture Review Boards.
🧪 German Gamboa (Olo): Master testing and safety harnesses for complex agent systems.

🎟️ Grab Your Spot (Before Tickets Disappear!)

Student and Early Bird passes are still available, but they are going fast! ⚡

Building solo? Perfect! We have a great team of mentors to provide support if you need it.
Rolling in with a squad? Bring your friends and register together (teams of 2–5).
Everyone belongs here: Game devs 🎮, UI/UX designers 🎨, product leaders 📊, engineers 💻, and curious newcomers alike.

Your pass includes full weekend access, hands-on workshops, meals, snacks, refreshments, and exclusive DevFest swag! 🍕☕👕

🎯 Spotlight Challenge: Transforming Education & Learning 📚✨

While we have competitive tracks spanning Devs, Game Devs, and Data for Good, our marquee spotlight theme this year is Education & Learning:

Personalized AI Mentors & Tutors: How can multimodal models adapt to diverse student needs and learning styles?
Accessible & Immersive EdTech: Leverage WebXR and interactive media to bring complex STEM, history, or vocational concepts to life.
Civic & Open Learning Platforms: Build lightweight, community-first tools that break down barriers to digital literacy and technical skill-building.

Bring your best ideas to life—with real cash prizes, sponsor perks, and direct feedback from industry mentors! 🏆💰

🗓️ At a Glance: Event Schedule

🏁 Friday, Nov 6: With the purchase of DevFest Florida tickets, you’ll get an invite to an exclusive mixer to connect to other devs, designers, and builders on Friday evening. You’ll also meet our speakers and mentors.
⚡ Saturday, Nov 7: Morning speaker sessions & technical workshops, followed by open hacking and 1-on-1 mentor support.
🏆 Sunday, Nov 8: Final sprint, project submissions (3:00 PM), live community demos, and the awards celebration!

Let’s Build Something Amazing Together! 🧡

DevFest is powered by our local developers, creators, and organizers right here in Central Florida. Bring your curiosity, your laptop, and your community spirit.

👉 Don’t wait—Secure your ticket today and we’ll see you at UCF Downtown in 6 days! 🚀🔥

Arthur Thompson

Developer Relations Engineer | Google

Building AI apps from scratch with the Google ecosystem

The way we build software has changed. Today, the most successful developers aren't just writing code, they are orchestrating AI tools and agents to build better and faster. This hands-on session is a deep dive into this modern "Builder Stack"

Carol Bolger

Founder / Flutter & AI Consultant | Real World Applications

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.

Loiane Groner

Director of Engineering | BNY

Specs Driven Development, Harness Engineering, Loops and Everything in Between

Chatting with LLMs is fun, but episodic prompting is a dead-end for enterprise software development. To build robust, production-ready code with AI, we need to move from 'prompt engineering' to SDD with 'harness and loop engineering.'

This session introduces an enterprise-scale architecture where AI agents and human developers co-author code inside a highly defensive, multi-layer validation harness. We walk through a Specs-Driven Development (SDD) methodology that keeps AI agents honest through rigid EARS-based specifications and TDD requirements.

We then dive deep into the mechanics of automated loops. You will learn how to design systems where an agent automatically polls MR pipelines, analyzes compiler traces, tracks down SonarQube issues, synthesizes the exact code modifications needed, and pushes updates iteratively until the build is 100% green.

Will Gorman

CTO | Nucleus Security

Agentic Engineering Workshop

This talk and optional lab will explore how the Software Developer role is evolving into Agentic Engineering. We will look at Agent Skills and Agent Orchestration impacting the traditional software development life cycle.

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Dwane Hemmings

JavaScript Developer Advocate | Vonage

WebXR: Augment Reality with Real-time Communications

Smart glasses are getting smarter with some being able to display WebXR experiences like their headset counterparts. In this interactive code-along workshop, we will create a WebXR application capable of receiving phone calls.

Muntaser Syed

Lead GenAI Engineer/Architect

Insight Global

Hashrope: One Data Structure, Four Languages

Strings do not scale to everything. When data is large, edited often, and shared between systems, you need a structure that supports fast edits and proves it has not been tampered with. Hashrope is a rope, a binary tree of text segments, where every node also carries a hash of its contents. The root hash therefore fingerprints the entire sequence: any copy can be verified with one comparison, and splits, merges, and inserts stay logarithmic. The same design is implemented four times, in Python, Rust, Java, and TypeScript, and published on PyPI, crates.io, Maven Central, and npm on a single version line. This session covers the design, live demos in Python and TypeScript, the conformance work that keeps four implementations identical, and where verified sequences pay off in practice, from data pipelines to AI agent memory.

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.