Public Speaking

Talks and conference videos on AI agents, evals, and machine learning

I love getting on stage to share hard-won, often counterintuitive lessons from building production AI systems and open-source machine learning tooling. Here’s a collection of my talks over the years, from AI agents and evals to bringing machine learning to the Ruby and Go communities.

AI Engineer World’s Fair: Evals Are Broken, Use Them Anyway (2026)

My most recent talk makes the case that benchmark numbers aren’t gospel, but pure “vibes” aren’t a system either. I walk through a three-zone failure-analysis framework for extracting real, actionable improvements from broken benchmarks, including how Cline climbed from 43% to 57% on Terminal Bench through harness fixes and prompt engineering rather than swapping models.

AI Engineer (Europe): Don’t Build Slop, 4 Levels of AI Agent Maturity (2026)

A dense talk on why most teams over-engineer their agents. I lay out four levels of agent maturity and five concrete rules for writing your own agent code, argue that the best agents are simple state machines with aggressively pruned prompts, and make the case for Kanban boards as the right UX for managing many parallel, inference-bound agents.

EuRuKo Ruby Conf: Introducing Tensorflow Ruby API (2017)

At Europe’s largest Ruby conference in Budapest, I introduced tensorflow.rb, the Ruby API for TensorFlow that I built with support from Somatic.io and the SciRuby foundation. The talk covers the core TensorFlow classes, image recognition with Inception v3, and visualization with TensorBoard, all from Ruby.

More Talks & Workshops

Over the years I’ve had the chance to speak at conferences across Europe and North America on machine learning, algorithm visualization, and life as a digital nomad in tech:

  • DevOpsDays Recife (2022): Digital nomading in tech — talk
  • GopherCon India (2019): Algorithm visualizations in Go — conference, project
  • Google Developers Windsor (2019): TensorFlow Ruby — event
  • GoWayFest Belarus (2018): Visualizations in Go — project
  • Ruby on Ice, Germany (2018): TensorFlow for Rubyists ML workshop — talk

If you’d like me to speak at your event, reach out on X (@arafatkatze).