DevOps Oxford - 30th April 2026

## Overview

DevOps Oxford: Free events and talks for Technology pros interested in tools & practices for faster delivery, secure systems, and better iteration.

Talk #1
Marco Zaccaria Di Fraia
Title: Green software is (generally) just good DevOps

Marco Zaccaria Di Fraia, PhD, is an engineer, researcher, and founder working across AI, space systems, and sustainability. Based in London, he's worked on problems ranging from deep-space navigation for asteroid proximity operations to autonomous retail, citizen science, and generative AI for creative industries and intelligence analysis. He often speaks on data ethics, DataOps, frontier technology and the future of work.

He recently founded Prismatic Labs to build what he kept arguing should exist: AI that's structurally bound to the systems it depends on. Prismatic Labs is building Vetch, an open-source SDK that makes the energy, carbon, water, and embodied hardware footprint of every LLM call visible in real time - with a longer-term vision of AI that orchestrates itself around planetary constraints.

Talk Description: For the most part, "green software" is just standard DevOps: practices like caching, right-sizing, and pruning idle resources usually cut both costs and emissions.
However, the alignment between cost and carbon is fragile, with the market generally rewarding cheap power, not clean power. At traditional scale, this tension was easy to ignore, but AI's infrastructure demands make it impossible to do so.

This talk uses RAG systems as a case study to explore the tradeoff - not because they dominate AI's emissions footprint, but because they're a deployment pattern most application teams already work with. We examine where the financial and environmental costs sit across retrieval, indexing, and generation, moving past the convenient fiction of infinite, neutral compute to ask what changes when developers can no longer treat location and timing as free variables.

Talk #2 -

Chintan Parmar
Title: Building My AI Second Brain: From Sidekick to Co-Engineer to Agent

Chintan Parmar is a Senior DevOps Consultant with 14 years' experience across financial services, retail, public sector, visual effects, and most recently quantum computing at Oxford Ionics. A long-standing advocate for platform engineering with a customer-first mindset — customer being the developers building on the platform as well as the end users of the platform.
At Dunelm, he was a key practitioner in building the Platform Engineering Centre of Enablement, evolving the team whilst shaping the cultural and technical foundations for a cloud-native environment. At Kingfisher, he led across multiple disciplines, including SRE and Developer Experience, embedding modern engineering practices and improving reliability at scale.

Over the past 18 months, AI has gone from a research tool to a daily collaborator across his work and home life — reshaping how he delivers, learns and thinks about scale. That shift, and where it goes next, sits at the heart of tonight's talk. Recognised through public talks and collaborations with the likes of AWS and GitLab on Digital Transformation, DevSecOps and more.

Talk Description: For many of us, our use of AI started with basic research. Today, AI is accelerating how engineers deliver, learn and operate — turning what once took weeks into hours. It's also been a powerful aid for Chintan with his neurodivergence — supporting structured thinking, sharper focus, and moving from rapid ideation to implementation. The thought that keeps returning: not how AI can replace you, but how it could scale your impact.
In this talk, Chintan walks through his journey with AI so far, from everyday sidekick, to engineering co-pilot, to autonomous agent — drawing on hands-on examples and honest failures. He shares the early thinking behind an AI second brain still taking shape: a system to hold the methods, judgement and accumulated context needed to operate as an extension of himself.

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We are always looking for new speakers who want to share their adventures within DevOps.

Please contact adrian@humand.co.uk