This year's DEV UP conference,
and by the way, for those that don't know, DEV UP is a conference
by developers, for developers, will differ because we're focused on resilience.
And we're not just focused on resilience when it comes to how we build our software, but we are.
We've added architecture as a track, but we're also focused on the cyber and control aspect of resilience, particularly because of the fact that the industry is changing so rapidly, and there's an increasing amount of bad actors that are out there.
But there's another part of resilience that's important for the conference, bringing all of our people together so that we are more resilient, that we can face change, that we can adapt.
That is one of the focuses of the conference this year, and it's a bit different than what we've done in our former ones.
From a firmwide perspective, DEV UP strengthens our technology culture.
It reinforces our commitment to engineering excellence, continuous learning, and cross-functional collaboration.
It’s also a powerful signal to our top talent, especially our top technologists, that their voices matter and their work is central to how we move forward.
The ripple effect is real.
Better ideas, stronger networks, faster progress on the things that matter most to our business and our clients.
Being part of that as a co-sponsor is both a privilege and a responsibility.
And for me, it's about amplifying what's working, removing friction where we can, and helping our teams feel seen, heard and empowered to lead.
I have taken a lot away from previous DEV UPs.
Some of the things that I've learned: the first is, wow, do we have some incredible talent that works here at the company.
Two, you can learn something from everyone.
It doesn't matter where you work in the organization.
There's just incredible things that are happening.
And when you stop and you listen, you find that you can apply that to your day job.
The other thing that I have learned is we are solving some incredible problems at incredible scale that you can't even imagine.
I am constantly amazed to learn that we're doing something that I had no idea.
And then also, I do learn that there's so much I still need to learn.
And that's what I think is incredible about the conference, is I learned myself tremendously throughout the entire event.
I think DEV UP represents our culture by reinforcing that notion of continuous learning, the idea that there's always skills to be learned and to be honed and to be developed.
I also think that DEV UP does one of those things that we do really well here at the firm, in that it makes this very, very large firm seem very small.
It shrinks the firm, which causes that collaboration.
And I think finally it says to our top technologists that you have a voice.
You actually are in control of where we go with technology at this firm.
I remember seeing this one solution.
The person told us this will reduce the build time for your applications by 90%.
And you can imagine myself and the people that were standing around were kind of thinking, hmm, maybe, okay.
What I took away was the next day, I met one of the people that was sitting with me in that booth watching this.
And she said, we implemented it last night, and it really did reduce the build time by 90%.
From that point to today, and I believe this was in March or April of this year, we are now implementing this across the firm and we are seeing the results.
So one direct solution that I've seen come out of DEV UP from prior years was one, I believe it was from the investment bank, and it was around the creation of environments to support learning and exploration.
Essentially, it was to produce a low friction way of people able to stand up environments so that they could reinforce their own learning.
That concept has kind of carried on, beyond DEV UP.
And this year we're actually going to see a soft launch of a product that takes that notion even further at DEV UP.
