TL;DR

QCon is one of my favourite events, and I’ve been to a lot of them over the years. 2026 was the best yet, so kudos to the programme committee and C4media organisers. The most fun bit was hosting the security track, where I got to run a mini security conference within the conference, with my dream line up of speakers. I loved it, and I hope everybody else who joined us across the day also enjoyed it.

20 Years of QCon

This year’s T-shirt proclaimed ’20th anniversary’, and ‘Est. 2006’, but that’s stretching things a little. Planning might have started in 2006 (and the announcement is still live on InfoQ, along with the PDF brochure), but the first QCon was in 2007. I should know, I was there as a speaker, co-presenting with Craig Heimark. It’s amazing to look back to that first instance and the line up of industry legends like Cameron Purdy, Martin Fowler, Rod Johnson and Werner Vogels.

There’s also not been 20 instances, as (like so many other in person events) things ground to a halt in 2021 due to COVID.

I’ve personally been at (or involved in[1]) 15 or the 19 instances.

Keynotes

All four keynotes this year hit the mark, and Laura Savino’s ‘Learning Out Loud’ absolutely smashed it – maybe the best keynote I’ve seen. Witty, engaging, thought provoking, relatable and something that spurs you to take action – everything that a keynote should be.

Track talks

I pretty much filled my schedule with talks on Monday and Wednesday (when I wasn’t hosting the security track). With only one exception the talks were good. I particularly enjoyed Hannah Foxwell (who’s always great) ‘The Reinvention of the Dev Team‘ (InfoQ: AI Agents Write Your Code. What’s Left For Humans?) and Christine Lemmer-Webber with David Thompson ‘Spritely: Infrastructure for the Future of the Internet‘[2].

Security track

Software Security & Risk Management if I must give the track its full title. I was delighted when Werner Schuster reached out to ask me to host the track, and almost immediately I pulled together a dream list of speakers. The programme committee gave me the green light, and everybody said yes :) [3] So this was very much the security track that I wanted to attend.

The topic and speakers were obviously popular, as we were in the ‘Mountbatten’ room on the 6th floor of the QEII conference centre for most of the day, which is a BIG room.

Sarah Wells got us of to a great start with ‘Why Governance Matters: The Key to Reducing Risk Without Slowing Down‘, and it was pleasing to see it listed as one of the top rated Tuesday talks during the Wednesday intros.

Alex Zenla followed with a Minecraft based explanation of ‘Building on Bedrock: A Security Philosophy from Bootloader to Runtime‘.

Viktor Petersson (I think) pulled in the largest audience for ‘From Chaos to Clarity: Modern SBOM Practices That Actually Work‘ (InfoQ writeup). I guess my scary point about EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) requirements might have caught some attention.

We then had an unconference session, which broke into two groups talking over a variety of issues that had been chosen and voted on by attendees.

Wrapping things up in the slightly smaller Windsor room on the 5th floor we had Andrew Martin talking about ‘Exploding GPUs‘ then David Chisnall on ‘Adopting Memory-Safety and Fine-Grained Compartmentalisation With CHERI‘.

You might notice that there’s no ‘AI’ in any of those titles. That didn’t mean that we weren’t talking about the industry’s hottest topic, just that it didn’t need to be centre stage.

As I was leaving the venue somebody looked at my badge and commented ‘you must be tired’, but in fact that wasn’t true at all. It had been a really energising day, and I was looking forward to more at the speaker’s dinner.

Networking

One of the first people I saw at the venue was Alex Zenla, and it was great to hang out with her for the many sessions we’d chosen in common. It was also good to spend time with Viktor, and there was more to come at Monkigras. But there was plenty of ‘hallway track’ providing opportunities to catch up with friends and meet new folk. The venue for the speaker’s dinner seemed to work well this year – definitely less wobbly than the previous one[4]. Finally it was wonderful to join the crew and InfoQ Editors at Flight Club for the wrap up event. I’ve not been to a dedicated darts venue before, and it was a lot of fun.

Conclusion

I know from past events that QCon has a culture of continuous improvement, and that really showed this time, as I’m pretty sure 2026 was the best yet. Hopefully I get to be involved in 2027, and it’s even better…

Notes

[1] QCon 2025 collided with the Easter holidays, so I missed attending in person even though I’d been on the programme committee.
[2] I’m linking to the InfoQ write ups of the talks, as it will be some months before the videos and transcripts are released.
[3] Sadly Liz Rice had to drop out shortly before the event, but it was great that Andrew Martin could step in.
[4] Recent past speaker’s dinners have been at the Tattershall Castle (aka ‘The General Belgrano’ to my Navy pals working in MoD Main Building), a ‘pub’ on a boat moored on the Thames near Whitehall. As it’s afloat it can bob around a bit as other traffic passes by on the river.