On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk.
Simon Willison—a longtime developer who co-created Django, a popular Python Web framework, and built Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data—has become one of the most thoughtful chroniclers of AI developments. If you have any doubts about how quickly AI is moving and improving, his lightning tour of the past year will put them to rest.
I was a bit shocked by obvious grammar and spelling issues in a public presentation. Is there something ‘special’ about this presenter or his crowd that I missed?
I’m usually pretty attuned to such things, and I admittedly more listened than watched, but I didn’t notice anything so blatant or common throughout his slides that made it worth mentioning. And I doubt anyone in that audience felt the need to point out to him any typos they may have noticed.
However I did enjoy learning about what is now my new favorite bird, the Kakapo parrot of New Zealand. If you’re unfamiliar, look it up, they’re a fascinating species!