DC State of the Stack 2026

Formerly DevOpsDays DC

For people who design, build, operate, and govern modern systems.

A community-driven technology conference rooted in the DC region, bringing together practitioners from engineering, operations, security, product, and adjacent disciplines to explore how real systems work in the real world. Each year, we engage with the technologies and practices shaping our industry — grounded in experience, tradeoffs, and real constraints. Substance over spectacle. Learning that carries forward into everyday work.

When

Sep 16-17, 2026

Where

American Red Cross

1730 E St NW, Washington, DC 20006

Who

You

2026 Theme

Shipping Software in the Age of AI

AI is reshaping how software is designed, built, operated, and governed — sometimes in useful ways, sometimes not. This year's program looks at what's actually happening in practice across the stack: where AI is earning its place in real systems, where it isn't, and what's changing for the people doing the work.

Featured Keynote

Max Kanat-Alexander

Executive Distinguished Engineer, Capital One

"Code Simplicity Applied to AI Coding Agents"

Max is an Executive Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, where he helps set the company's strategy for AI-assisted software development. Before that, he was the Chief Architect of the Bugzilla Project, then the Tech Lead for Code Health at Google, and then one of the Tech Leads for Developer Productivity and Happiness at LinkedIn. He has written two books, Code Simplicity and Understanding Software. He was the primary author of Google's code review guidelines, as well as the LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework.

Featured Keynote

Noble Ackerson

Senior Director of AI and Agentic Solutions, Leidos

"Shipping Software When Half Your Stack Is Probabilistic"

Noble Ackerson is Senior Director of AI and Agentic Solutions at Leidos, where he builds and ships production agent systems for federal and enterprise customers.

He is a Google Developer Expert for Cloud AI/ML, an instructor for the Google Cloud Agent Engineering Nanodegree, and the author of rai-checklist-cli, an open source tool for responsible AI compliance.

His work focuses on evaluation, governance, and the practical question of how to trust a system you cannot fully specify.

He last spoke at this conference in 2023, arguing that putting generative AI into production would mean wrapping it in more complexity than anyone wanted to admit.

Featured Keynote

Melissa M. Reeve

Founder of HyperadaptiveSolutions, Author of "Hyperadaptive"

"Becoming Hyperadaptive: Where Are You on the AI Adoption Journey?"

Melissa Reeve brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective shaped by over three decades at the intersection of executive leadership, organizational transformation, and process excellence. Her foundation in the Lean mindset began at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she studied the Toyota Production System and witnessed Hino Motor Company's Andon cords in action. This early exposure to process excellence informed her pioneering work with Agile marketing from 2011. As the first VP of Marketing at Scaled Agile and thought leader in the SAFe in Marketing space, Melissa immersed herself in systems thinking, Total Quality Management, DevOps, and Lean principles. She went on to co-found the Agile Marketing Alliance, where she built a community of Agile marketing practitioners and gained firsthand insight into the challenges of organizational change. Recognizing the enormous impact of AI with ChatGPT's introduction in November 2022, Melissa dedicated herself to researching AI's organizational impacts. Hyperadaptive represents the culmination of this work, offering a synthesis of process excellence, organizational evolution, and the human side of AI integration that provides leaders with a practical pathway to becoming AI-native enterprises.

Free with registration

Take home Hyperadaptive

Every registered attendee receives a free printed copy of Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native by featured keynote speaker Melissa M. Reeve. Meet Melissa and get your copy signed during the Day 2 lunch break, right after her keynote.

Registration — Now Open

Grab your ticket before they're gone.

Join us September 16-17, 2026 in Washington, DC for two days of real talk from practitioners. Early bird pricing available now.

Sponsorship — Now Available

Be part of something that matters.

Sponsoring DC State of the Stack is an opportunity to engage with practitioners who care deeply about how systems actually work — engineers, operators, and leaders from across the DC region doing serious technical work.

Become a Sponsor →

Exploring the Full Stack

Platform Engineering AI & ML Ops Security Cloud Native DevOps Data Engineering Developer Experience Product Delivery People Leadership Compliance Quality Engineering

Brought to you by the same team that ran DevOpsDays DC for years. Same great community. Broader vision.