QCon London 2026: The Useful Parts Were the Quiet Ones

QCon London 2026 reminded me that the day starts before the first talk.

I work from home, so I am not used to going into central London anymore. By the time I arrived on day one, I was already tired. That actually helped. I had less patience for vague claims and polished sales talk.

You could feel that on the sponsor floor straight away. A lot of it was too AI-heavy for me. Not because AI came up, but because every pitch sounded almost the same. Faster delivery. Better decisions. Less effort. More automation. Big promises. Not much about limits, tradeoffs, or what happens when any of it hits a real system. After a while it all blurred together.

The talks I found most useful were the opposite. I spent most of my time on distributed systems, especially testing and resilience. Those talks stayed close to the work. Failure. Recovery. Degraded systems. Tradeoffs. The simple fact that things break and you still have to keep them running.

I also paid a lot of attention to observability. That is something I want to get better at, and QCon made it clearer why. Good observability is not just more dashboards. It is being able to answer basic questions fast when a system starts going wrong. What changed. Where is the pressure. What matters first.

The other theme I kept coming back to was software governance, especially SBOMs. Again, the interesting part was not generating them because a process says you should. It was whether they are useful when you actually need them. What are we running. Where did it come from. What depends on it. What do we need to check when something breaks or a vulnerability lands. If an SBOM cannot help with that, it is hard to care that it exists.

That was the pattern across the conference for me. The loudest parts were often the least useful. The talks that stuck with me were the ones rooted in real engineering work.

I enjoyed QCon a lot, but that is not really the point. The useful part was leaving with a clearer sense of what I want to improve and a stronger preference for work that deals with reality.