The Future Belongs to the Adaptable: AI, Development, and What's Next !

"This is our biggest meetup of the year, and we're honored to welcome Jeff Barr to the stage.

Jeff will speak on:
The Future Belongs to the Adaptable: Lessons for Developers in the Age of AI

"With the advent of generative AI, the practice of software and application development is changing at an unparalleled rate. This rapid, unceasing change is empowering to some and unsettling to others. Experienced practitioners are no longer sure about their place in the tech world, while those looking in from the outside see a possible way to enter that very same world. Leaders want to benefit from AI and are still struggling to find the best way to structure and empower their workforce. In this talk, Jeff will share his observations, recommendations, and advice gleaned from a tech career that has spanned almost five decades, from mainframes, through personal computers, the cloud, and artificial intelligence."

# Jeff Barr

VP & Chief Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
Jeff Barr joined Amazon in 2002, and became the company’s first web services evangelist in 2003. In his role as Chief Evangelist, Jeff strives to explain the benefits of cloud computing and web services to anyone who will listen. Jeff founded the AWS News Blog in 2004 and wrote 3,283 posts totaling 1.5 million words over the course of 20 years. He also streams AWS updates every week for the AWS OnAir show and maintains an active social media presence.
Jeff earned his Bachelor’s degree in computer science from American University and his Master’s degree in Communication and Digital Media from the University of Washington. Before coming to Amazon, Jeff held development and management positions at Microsoft, KnowNow, eByz, and Akopia, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. He is also the author of the 2010 book, Host Your Website in the Cloud, and been a technical reviewer for five books on web services.
Jeff is also a maker, and enjoys building with code, LEGO, electronics, and 3D printing.

Then we will have VeUp speak on:

AI-DLC for Managed Services: How VeUP Runs a Fully Automated MSP on AWS
Most teams use AI to write code a little faster. AWS AI-DLC goes further — it redesigns the full development and operations lifecycle so AI is a structured collaborator: it elaborates intent, proposes architecture and code, and operates systems under human approval gates.
In this session, VeUP Engineering walks through both sides of that story:

1. The AWS AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) — Inception → Construction → Operations, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and how open adaptive AI-DLC workflows turn AI from a chat box into a disciplined engineering process that works across common agentic coding tools (your team's choice of assistant).
2. A live architecture walkthrough of VeUP's fully automated MSP control plane on AWS — how we apply the same AI-native patterns to multi-account managed services: customer onboarding, cross-account security baselines, finding intake, AI-assisted investigation and remediation, and continuous compliance evidence.
   We'll show how Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management and Bedrock Guardrails sit at the center of production AI decisions — versioned prompts, content safety on every model call, and safe fallbacks that always escalate to humans — orchestrated with Step Functions and EventBridge, investigated with AWS DevOps Agent, and secured with least-privilege cross-account access across independent customer Organizations.
   What you'll walk away with:
   • A clear mental model of AWS AI-DLC vs. "AI-assisted coding," independent of any single IDE or coding agent

This event is sponsored by VeUp