I have spent most of my career working on technologies people initially considered too new, too risky or too complicated.

Cloud before it was normal. Real-time data before every architecture diagram had a streaming box. Apache Flink before most companies knew why they might need it. AI before every second presentation started with a robot generated in Midjourney.

That gives me a useful perspective.

I know what it feels like to be early. I also know how quickly “innovation” turns into theatre once enough people discover the vocabulary.

That is what I speak about.

Not technology as a collection of fashionable terms, but what happens when it meets customers, legacy systems, organisational politics, production incidents, budgets and the occasional executive who has already promised the result before anyone checked whether it can actually be built.

My main subjects sit somewhere between deep technology, business reality and the human behaviour that connects the two.

That includes:

• Artificial intelligence beyond prototypes and press releases
• Real-time systems with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink
• AI agents, state, reliability and distributed systems
• Concept drift and adaptive machine learning
• Turning difficult first projects into repeatable business
• Building technical capability across countries and cultures
• The difference between innovation and expensive theatre
• What technical leaders learn when the architecture meets reality

Some sessions are deeply technical. Others are more strategic. Most live somewhere in between.

I do not speak about these subjects from the safe distance of a trend report.

Over the past two decades, I have built technology, sold it, implemented it, rescued it, explained it to executives and occasionally stared at it at two in the morning while it ignored the carefully prepared migration plan.

I helped build a full motor insurance platform with dynamic pricing in ten months. I worked on moving the first services of a global insurer into the cloud. I helped build professional services capabilities in Germany and the Middle East. I later travelled globally to turn difficult first projects into customer success, references and repeatable business.

Alongside that work, I am pursuing a PhD in Applied AI, researching concept drift and adaptive systems in real-time environments.

In other words, I like theory.

I just prefer it after it has survived contact with reality.