QCon San Francisco International Software Development Conference & Training Days. Nov 16-20, 2026.

The gap between emerging technology and proven implementation is where most teams lose months. What’s experimental today becomes table stakes faster than most engineering organizations can track. The architectural decisions you make now shape your systems for years. The fastest path to clarity is learning directly from senior practitioners who’ve already navigated these trade-offs. Not vendor pitches. Not keynotes built around products. Peer-to-peer knowledge from engineers who’ve built, shipped, and scaled. QCon San Francisco 2026 brings that concentrated access together in one place. From November 16–18, 60+ senior practitioners share what’s working and what isn’t, across AI engineering, architecture, platform engineering, and software leadership. Followed by two days of optional hands-on training, November 19–20. Every session is hand-selected by a program committee of senior practitioners based on real production experience, not sponsorships. The mini-conference format means each track goes deep: no broad surveys, no introductory content, no marketing fluff. Speakers are senior engineers, architects, and tech leads who are building and scaling these systems right now, not consultants or academics theorizing about what might work. Beyond the sessions, unconference formats create space for honest peer conversations about the challenges you’re actually facing. These are the connections that extend well beyond three days in San Francisco. QCon San Francisco 2026 marks 20 years of practitioner-curated conferences, built on one principle: the fastest way to validate your technical direction is to hear from engineers who have already navigated similar decisions at scale. The signals you pick up compound quickly, helping you cut months of experimentation and make better architectural calls before they become expensive to reverse. What You’ll Experience at QCon San Francisco 2026 • Focused sessions on AI engineering, resilient architectures, platform engineering, and mor