An international technical software development conference

Bio: Vipin Jain has more than 25 years of experience in the IT industry, with two decades dedicated to software quality. As Head of QA and Delivery at Metacube Software, he works on delivery operations, quality culture, and practical engineering leadership. Vipin is an active international speaker and writer, with talks at conferences such as EuroSTAR, SEETEST, TestCon, HUSTEF, TestingUnited, and QA: Challenge Accepted. He has published many articles and blog posts on software quality, testing, and engineering practices.

Talk description: Quality can no longer be delegated to QA teams or solved by automation alone. In fast-moving engineering organizations, it is a leadership problem that affects architecture, team structure, delivery speed, risk, and customer trust. Vipin will show how engineering managers, tech leads, and senior engineers can think about quality as a system of decisions rather than a separate testing activity. The talk focuses on practical leadership patterns: aligning quality with business goals, supporting testing without being a QA expert, balancing speed with confidence, and building shared ownership across teams. You will leave with a clearer way to lead quality before it becomes firefighting.

Bio: Kiril Vuchkov is a Senior Engineering Manager at Vay, leading teams behind a driverless mobility product across distributed backend services, web, and mobile applications. Previously, he worked on Uber's internal invoicing platform and at VMware on private cloud infrastructure and developer experience. Kiril brings strong experience in distributed systems, cross-team collaboration, and engineering reliability. Outside of work, he runs tabletop role-playing campaigns, paints miniatures, and has recently been learning tango, which probably teaches debugging communication in a different production environment.

Talk description: Green builds can still lead to red alerts. In distributed systems, the real failures often hide between teams, services, contracts, and assumptions rather than inside one bad function. Kiril will share real production reliability stories where code compiled, tests passed, and the system still broke. You will hear about APIs that behaved differently than downstream teams expected, rollouts that went sideways, and tests that missed the actual risk. The talk turns these stories into practical patterns for shifting reliability left: clearer cross-team contracts, automated safeguards, safer rollouts, and smaller blast radius. Useful for backend, platform, and engineering leaders working across service boundaries.

Bio: Nikola Lazarov is a Frontend Developer at Progress Software and an educational content creator. He works on company websites, internal libraries, and modern web tooling, while also building side projects such as Budget Warden and developer utilities. Nikola enjoys researching technology, explaining it clearly, and sharing what he learns through his YouTube channel. Outside software, he likes science, space, finance, movies, travel, electronics, CAD, and 3D printing experiments.

Talk description: Cross-platform development often starts with a beautiful promise: write once, run anywhere. Nikola’s personal finance app started there too, until real-world mobile development showed the hidden cost of that promise. This talk is a migration story from React Native to native iOS and Android codebases with a shared core. Nikola will explain the friction of translation layers, delayed native API access, forced UI parity, and platform-specific expectations. He will also show why SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose made parts of the system simpler and more reliable. A useful session for developers choosing between speed, control, and long-term maintainability.

Bio: Vladislav Valchev has been a software developer at Chaos since 2011. He has worked on key projects including V-Ray integrations for Unreal Engine, XSI, 3ds Max, GPU rendering, and other rendering technologies. Today he leads teams working on Chaos Vantage, V-Ray GPU, and Chaos Phoenix. Outside computer graphics, Vladislav is interested in AI for games and competitive programming, and he also works with school students to introduce them to computer science.

Talk description: Photorealistic rendering used to mean waiting. A lot. V-Ray became one of the industry’s most popular renderers for architecture, visual effects, automotive design, and more, starting as a CPU-based ray tracing engine and later expanding to GPU rendering. Chaos Vantage takes the story further as a real-time path tracer built on DirectX 12, using modern GPU ray tracing to deliver high visual quality immediately. Vladislav will explain the engineering journey from offline rendering to real-time photorealism, the technical challenges behind it, and the solutions that made it possible. A great session for developers curious about graphics, performance, and serious GPU work.

Bio: Ognyan Chikov is Head of Engineering at LimeChain, with a background in software engineering, blockchain, and distributed systems. He has worked on Web3 projects across decentralized finance, cross-chain infrastructure, and zero-knowledge technologies. In his day-to-day work, Ognyan focuses on scalable and secure blockchain systems, interoperability, and performance. He has also mentored developers through LimeAcademy, helping engineers move into the Web3 space and understand the infrastructure behind decentralized systems.

Talk description: Blockchain scaling is not only about faster execution. As high-throughput systems mature, the real bottleneck often moves into the data and networking layer. Using Solana and DoubleZero as context, Ognyan will explain how data propagation, bandwidth, latency, and validator connectivity shape real-world performance. The talk moves beyond smart contracts and into the infrastructure that makes performance possible. Engineers, infrastructure builders, and developers will learn why networking and data availability are becoming critical, how DoubleZero approaches the problem, and how to think about system design when execution is no longer the main limit.

Bio: Nedko Hristov is a Senior DevOps Engineer at Nemetschek Bulgaria with a rare full-lifecycle view of software, shaped by years in QA and DevOps. He works on fixing, rebuilding, securing, and automating professional-grade solutions in the Nemetschek AG and Bluebeam ecosystem. Nedko is also a mentor in Mentor The Young, a homelab enthusiast, a vintage-lens photographer, and a long-distance cyclist who somehow finds peace by riding for days into the nothingness.

Talk description: Modern DevOps security can feel like trying to guard a castle while the walls are being rebuilt by npm packages, cloud permissions, and five different pipelines. Nedko will strip away the marketing fluff around Security as Code and look at the uncomfortable reality underneath: automation can hide risk, dashboards can create security theater, and supply chains can break trust in surprising ways. The talk connects DevOps, QA thinking, architecture, and practical guardrails that make not deleting production a system feature, not a personal miracle. Expect skepticism, humor, and useful patterns for staying secure without going crazy.

Bio: Benjamin Bischoff spent 15 years as a software developer and trainer before moving into test automation in 2016. He now works as a Test Automation Engineer at trivago in Düsseldorf, focusing on backend and frontend test technologies and pipelines. Benjamin is the author of Writing API Tests with Karate, maintains open-source testing projects, speaks regularly at conferences, and writes about testing, automation, and software craftsmanship at softwaretester.blog.

Talk description: Every few years, our industry gets a new wave that promises to change everything: Yahoo, Google, Agile, test automation, and now AI. Benjamin has watched enough waves to notice the pattern: big promises, overnight experts, hidden costs, and eventually a reality check. This talk is not anti-AI; it is pro-common sense. Benjamin will share stories from 25 years in software, from USB-stick code sharing to modern AI tools, and show why the human problems stay surprisingly stable. You will leave with practical skepticism, better questions to ask before adopting tools, and a reminder that every revolution can become someone’s legacy system.

Bio: Dr. Ilian Iliev has been programming since 2003 and has loved Python since 2009 for its simplicity, power, and flexibility. He works as a Senior Software Engineer at Redis and enjoys building APIs, solving backend problems, and helping other developers improve their skills. Ilian is active in community events and likes sharing practical knowledge, especially with people still finding their way in software engineering. Outside tech, he loves the sea, snorkeling, fishing, and traveling.

Talk description: Sooner or later, every developer meets a system that feels like a foreign land without a map: opaque, brittle, poorly documented, and somehow still critical. Ilian will share practical strategies for debugging unknown systems and show how AI tools such as ChatGPT can support the process without replacing human judgment. The talk treats debugging as exploration: generating hypotheses, understanding dependencies, asking better questions, and building structure around uncertainty. You will learn how to combine AI assistance with careful reasoning, so unfamiliar systems become less scary and unexpected behavior becomes a trail you can actually follow.