In 2026, we’ve learned not to measure developer productivity by lines of code. What actually matters is the velocity of the “inner loop” and getting to production. Agentic AI and hyper-distributed deployment topologies solve many problems, but developers still face many of the same frictions – cognitive overload, code overload, and configuration overload. This session mixes a high level strategic overview of the modern developer journey with live demos of how IBM’s modern frameworks bring the developer joy

It will cover:

• Why developer productivity is about more than outputs
• Standard First Architecture: Why relying on Jakarta EE and MicroProfile creates portable, future-proof systems.
• Observability by Design: Moving beyond simple logging to a standardized telemetry approach that provides instant feedback.
• How to identify and eliminate “toil” in your specific development lifecycle.