SOFTCON.ph: The Philippine Software Industry Conference

26/08/2026

🤖 Vibe Code Responsibly – How to Write Secure and Maintainable Software with Agentic AI

Anyone can vibe code.

But is the code secure? Maintainable? Aligned with your business requirements? And ready for production?

There's an ocean of difference between an AI-generated prototype that looks impressive in a demo and software that can actually survive in a production environment.

Join Raphael Jambalos, Head of Technology at eCloudValley Philippines, for a hands-on, demo-driven session on how to move beyond simply prompting AI to generate code — and start using agentic AI to build software responsibly.

Using Kiro, AWS's AI-powered IDE, Raphael will demonstrate how Spec-Driven Development can bring structure and discipline to AI-assisted coding, helping developers translate business requirements into software that's easier to understand, maintain, and evolve.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ How to create better prompts that guide AI toward software that actually satisfies your business requirements

✅ Why there's a critical difference between a vibe-coded prototype and a production-ready application

✅ How Spec-Driven Development can bring structure, requirements, and maintainability to AI-assisted software development

✅ How to use Kiro to turn specifications into a more disciplined AI development workflow

✅ How Steering Docs can help AI consistently follow your project's coding standards and conventions

✅ How Agent Hooks can automate repetitive development tasks and workflows

✅ How MCP Servers can extend your AI development environment with additional tools and capabilities

✅ How Kiro Powers can help integrate third-party services and your own workflows into the development process

Most importantly, you'll see these concepts put into practice through a live demo—not just slides and theory.

Participants can follow along using their own Kiro IDE or simply watch as Raphael demonstrates how agentic AI can be used to build software with greater attention to security, maintainability, consistency, and real business requirements.

Whether you're a software developer, architect, engineering manager, technical lead, or anyone experimenting with AI-assisted coding, this session will help you move beyond:

"Can AI build this?"

and start asking:

"Can AI help me build this properly?"

📅 Catch Raphael Jambalos at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com

25/08/2026

🤖 Three Frameworks, One Protocol: An Empirical Study of Agentic AI Architectures for QA Intelligence Using LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and A2A

Choosing an agentic AI framework can shape your entire AI system.

LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen all promise to help teams orchestrate intelligent agent, but how do they actually compare when you move beyond demos and build the same production-grade system with each one?

Join Anthony Seumal, PhD in Data Science Student at the Asian Institute of Management, as he shares empirical results from implementing a real QA intelligence system across all three frameworks — and then connecting them through Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol.

Instead of relying on toy examples or vendor documentation, this session puts the frameworks through the same real-world challenge: taking a software feature specification and autonomously producing a risk register, prioritized test strategy, and executable Playwright test scaffolds.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ How LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen compare when used to build the same production-grade agentic AI system

✅ The architectural differences between the three frameworks — and how those differences affect real development decisions

✅ How each framework performs across six practical dimensions: developer experience, architectural expressiveness, tool integration, observability, token efficiency, and failure behavior

✅ How agentic AI can turn a software feature specification into a risk register, prioritized testing strategy, and executable test scaffolds

✅ How Anthony's VRTQ framework can be used for risk-based test prioritization within an AI-driven QA workflow

✅ How the A2A protocol enables agents built with different frameworks to communicate and work together

✅ How to design more framework-agnostic agentic systems instead of locking your architecture into a single ecosystem

You'll also see all three frameworks connected into a single cross-framework pipeline, demonstrating what interoperability between different agentic technologies can look like in practice.

Most importantly, you'll leave with a practical decision framework, benchmark data, and a working blueprint to help you choose the agentic architecture that fits your use case.

Whether you're an AI engineer, QA professional, software developer, architect, engineering manager, or technology leader evaluating agentic AI frameworks, this session will help you make architectural decisions based on real implementation evidence—not just feature lists and hype.

📅 Catch Anthony Seumal at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com

24/08/2026

⏰ 1 WEEK LEFT to get SOFTCON 2026 Early Bird Rates!

The countdown is on! Early Bird rates end August 31, 2026—and after that, ticket prices go up to the regular rates.

If SOFTCON 2026 is on your calendar, now's the time to lock in your ticket and save 50%! 🚀

🎟️ EARLY BIRD RATES

🔥 FULL XP
₱7,000 Early Bird | ₱14,000 Regular

💻 STREAM
₱4,500 Early Bird | ₱9,000 Regular

🎤 D3 LIVE
₱5,000 Early Bird | ₱10,000 Regular

👥 Coming with your team? Get an additional 10% off for groups of 7 or more.

Special rates are also available for PSIA members, academe, government, and students.

🚀 Learn What's Next in Software

Join software practitioners, engineering leaders, AI experts, architects, researchers, and innovators as they dive into the technologies and challenges reshaping our industry:

🤖 AI & Agentic AI
💻 AI-Assisted Software Development
🔐 Cybersecurity & Data Security
🧪 QA & Quality Engineering
📊 Data, Machine Learning & AI Infrastructure
⚙️ Agile, DevOps & Software Architecture
🚀 Engineering Leadership & the Future of Software Careers

From building production-ready AI agents and choosing the right LLMs to Spec-Driven Development, AI coding, security, modern QA, data engineering, and more—SOFTCON 2026 is designed to give you practical insights you can bring back to your projects and teams.

🎓 PLUS: Get access to the AI-Enabled Software Developer Course + Certificate!

📅 October 26–27, 2026 — Online
📍 October 28, 2026 — SMX BGC + Online

⏳ DON'T MISS THE DEADLINE

Early Bird rates end August 31. Just 1 week left!

👉 Buy your tickets now at softconph.com

Tag your teammates and colleagues who should be at SOFTCON 2026! 👇

If your company is a PEZA/BOI-certified organization or if your finance department requires a service invoice prior to payment processing, we will process your registration offline. Upload your BIR Certificate of Registration (COR/2303), PEZA/BOI VAT Zero-Rating certificate (if applicable), and regi...

24/08/2026

📊 Fabric Data Transformer: Simplifying Data Preparation for the AI and Analytics Era

AI and analytics are only as valuable as the data behind them.

Yet for many organizations, getting data ready for use remains one of the biggest challenges. Raw information is often fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to transform, leaving data teams spending significant time cleaning, mapping, and preparing it before meaningful analysis can even begin.

Join Eugene Paden, Chief Technology Officer at Ray Business Technologies Inc., as he introduces Fabric Data Transformer (FDT) and explores how modern data transformation can help organizations turn complex, unstructured data preparation into streamlined workflows for analytics, business intelligence, and AI.

Built within the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, FDT bridges the gap between raw data and business value, helping organizations reduce complexity and accelerate their journey toward trusted, analytics-ready information.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ The biggest challenges organizations face when preparing and transforming data for modern analytics and AI

✅ How Microsoft Fabric fits into a unified, modern data platform strategy

✅ How to identify opportunities to improve data quality and analytics readiness

✅ How Fabric Data Transformer can simplify complex data transformation workflows

✅ Best practices for moving from fragmented raw data to trusted, usable information more efficiently

✅ How better data transformation can help reduce complexity, cost, and time-to-insight

✅ Practical ways transformed data can support reporting, business intelligence, analytics, and AI initiatives

Through practical use cases and real-world scenarios, you'll see how modern data transformation platforms can provide the foundation organizations need to get more value from their data—and prepare it for the demands of AI.

Whether you're a data engineer, data professional, IT manager, business leader, architect, or technology decision-maker, this session will help you make one of the most important parts of the data journey simpler, faster, and more scalable.

Because before your organization can become AI-driven, your data needs to be ready.

📅 Catch Eugene Paden at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com

21/08/2026

🎓 Calling All Students: Join SOFTCON 2026 for Only ₱1,000!

Want to learn what's next in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data, quality engineering, DevOps, and more—without breaking your student budget?

We've made SOFTCON 2026 more accessible to the next generation of software professionals with a special Student Stream Rate of only ₱1,000! 🚀

That's the same Stream ticket inclusions and benefits available to Academe at ₱2,500 — at a fraction of the price.

🎟️ STUDENT STREAM RATE: ONLY ₱1,000

Join SOFTCON 2026 online and learn directly from software practitioners, CTOs, engineering leaders, AI experts, researchers, architects, and innovators from the Philippines and around the world.

💡 Here's what you can learn:

🤖 AI & Agentic AI — Explore AI agents, LLMs, AI-assisted coding, Spec-Driven Development, and the next generation of AI interfaces.

💻 Software Engineering — Learn how professional teams build secure, maintainable, production-ready software in the age of AI.

🔐 Cybersecurity — Understand secure coding, data security for AI agents and APIs, and emerging security challenges.

🧪 QA & Quality Engineering — Discover modern testing practices, automation strategies, and how AI is changing the role of QA.

📊 Data & Machine Learning — Dive into data engineering, computer vision, AI accelerators, and modern data transformation.

⚙️ Agile, DevOps & Tech Careers — Learn how engineering practices—and the skills developers need—are evolving.

And there's much more across the SOFTCON 2026 program.

🌟 Learn Today. Build What's Next.

If you're studying Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Data Science, AI, Cybersecurity, or another technology-related field, this is your opportunity to learn beyond the classroom and hear how technology is being applied in the real world.

📅 October 26–27, 2026 — Online

🎓 Student Stream: ₱1,000 only
🏫 Academe Stream: ₱2,500

Same Stream inclusions and benefits. Special student price.

👉 Get your Student Stream ticket at softconph.com

Tag your classmates and bring your tech community with you! 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Join us at SOFTCON 2026, the biggest software industry conference in the Philippines! Happening on October 26-28, SOFTCON brings together tech leaders, industry experts, and software professionals for 3 days of learning and networking.

18/08/2026

🤖 Engineering and Evaluating AI Agents that Perform in the Real World

Building an AI agent that works in a demo is one thing.

Building one that can reason, choose the right tools, complete tasks reliably, and perform consistently in production is a very different engineering challenge.

Join Joshua Arvin Lat, Vice President of Cybersecurity and AI at Axos and AWS AI Hero, as he explores the practical techniques needed to take AI agents beyond impressive prototypes and turn them into reliable, production-ready systems.

This session will dive into both sides of the challenge: how to engineer better agentic workflows and how to evaluate whether your agents are actually performing well.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ How to design effective agentic workflows for real-world applications

✅ How to define meaningful evaluation metrics that go beyond simple accuracy

✅ How to measure task completion, reasoning quality, and tool selection to better understand agent performance

✅ How to use LLM-as-a-Judge as part of an AI agent evaluation strategy

✅ How to combine automated evaluation pipelines and human evaluation for more reliable assessments

✅ Why regression testing matters for AI agents—and how to detect when changes make an agent worse instead of better

✅ How production monitoring can help identify failures and performance issues once agents encounter real users and unpredictable situations

Whether you're an AI engineer, software developer, architect, product owner, engineering manager, or technology leader, this session will give you a practical framework for answering one of the most important questions in agentic AI:

How do you know your AI agent is actually ready for the real world?

📅 Catch Joshua Arvin Lat at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com

17/08/2026

🧪 Flaky, Fragile, and Forgotten: The Fall of a Test Automation Project

Test automation is supposed to make software delivery faster and more reliable.

But what happens when the tests themselves become the problem?

Flaky tests. Slow pipelines. Cascading failures. Difficult-to-debug automation. Eventually, teams can spend more time fixing their tests than delivering their product.

Join Mesut Durukal, QA Capabilities Leader at OMP, as he shares lessons from a real project where an automation suite had deteriorated to the point that the team was dedicating much of its capacity just to fixing broken tests and stabilizing automation.

Through real code examples and lessons learned from rebuilding the testing approach, Mesut will break down the anti-patterns that caused the automation project to become a delivery bottleneck—and the practical changes that helped make testing faster, clearer, and more reliable.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ Why automated tests become flaky, fragile, slow, and difficult to maintain over time

✅ How poor test architecture and unnecessary framework overhead can slow pipelines and make failures harder to diagnose

✅ How duplicated workflows and inefficient session handling create unnecessary ex*****on overhead

✅ Why shared state, ordering assumptions, and test-suite dependencies can cause failures to cascade across your automation suite

✅ How excessive abstraction can hide test intent and make automation harder to understand, troubleshoot, and maintain

✅ How to decide what should be tested at the UI level—and what belongs in lower-level tests

✅ Practical ways to design tests that are independent, focused, fast, maintainable, and reliable

Most importantly, you'll learn why sustainable test automation isn't just the responsibility of QA.

It requires developers, testers, product owners, and managers to align on ownership, tooling, testing strategy, and quality standards.

Whether you're a QA engineer, test automation engineer, developer, engineering manager, or technical lead, this session will help you recognize the warning signs of an unhealthy automation suite—and avoid turning the tool that's supposed to accelerate delivery into the very thing that's blocking it.

📅 Catch Mesut Durukal at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com

14/08/2026

🚀 The Last Upgrade Isn’t Your Stack — It’s You

Everyone’s talking about AI agents and how they’re changing software development.

But the biggest disruption may not be what AI can do. It’s what AI is changing about the role of the software engineer.

As AI takes over more routine coding tasks, simply being able to write code is no longer enough. The engineers who stand out will be those who can connect technology to user needs, product outcomes, and real business value.

Join Gian Crescini Santillan, Chief Technology Officer at Digital Innoventures Group, as he explores the rise of the product engineer—a developer who doesn't just ask “How do we build this?” but also understands “Why are we building it, who are we building it for, and what outcome should it create?”

This isn't the death of software engineering. It's an upgrade.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ How AI is changing the role and expectations of software engineers

✅ Why routine coding skills alone may become less of a differentiator as AI capabilities grow

✅ What it means to evolve from a traditional software engineer into a product engineer

✅ Why understanding users, business goals, and product outcomes is becoming an essential engineering skill

✅ How to think beyond features and functions to understand the “why” behind what you build

✅ The human skills that become more valuable—not less—as AI takes on more development tasks

✅ How developers can position themselves to remain relevant and create greater impact in an AI-powered software industry

Whether you're a developer, software architect, engineering manager, technical lead, or technology leader, this session will challenge you to think beyond the next framework, programming language, or AI tool.

Because your most important next upgrade might not be your technology stack.

It might be you.

📅 Catch Gian Crescini Santillan at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com

11/08/2026

⏰ Only 3 Weeks Left to Save 50% on SOFTCON 2026

Don't miss out on the lowest rates! Catch the SOFTCON 2026 Early Bird Rates until August 31 only! Prices increase on September 1.

Your ticket includes:

✅ FREE AI-Enabled Software Developer Course + Certificate

✅ Access to expert-led technical sessions*

✅ Practical workshops and live demonstrations*

✅ Tech Expo and networking opportunities

✅ Lunch and AM+PM snacks on Day 3**

✅ Certificate of Attendance

✅ Limited-time access to session recordings*

*Subject to your selected ticket type. D3 Live is limited to Day 3 sessions only.
** For Full XP and D3 Live

Special discounts are available for PSIA members, academe, and government delegates.
Groups of seven (7) or more receive an additional 10% discount, making it the perfect opportunity to bring your entire team.

Buy your tickets now at https://softconph.com/ticket-options/

11/08/2026

🚀 How Software Development Methodologies Evolve with Your Product

Is there really one "best" software development methodology?

From startup MVPs to enterprise platforms and legacy modernization, every stage of a product's lifecycle presents different challenges. Yet many organizations continue using the same development approach long after their needs have changed.

Join Calen Legaspi, Founder of Orange and Bronze Software Labs, as he explores how software development methodologies should evolve alongside your product, your team, and your business. Drawing from decades of experience, Calen will compare approaches such as Lean Startup, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Disciplined Agile, DevOps, and Waterfall, and explain when—and why—each can be the right choice.

💡 What you'll learn:

✅ Why no single software development methodology fits every stage of a product's lifecycle

✅ How business uncertainty, team size, engineering maturity, and operational risk influence the way teams should work

✅ The strengths and trade-offs of Lean Startup, Scrum, XP, Kanban, DevOps, Disciplined Agile, and Waterfall

✅ How to recognize when your current development process is no longer serving your product

✅ A practical framework for evolving your engineering practices as your product and organization grow

Whether you're a software developer, engineering manager, Scrum Master, architect, product manager, or technology executive, this session will help you choose the right methodology for the challenges you're solving today—not the ones you faced yesterday.

📅 Catch Calen Legaspi at SOFTCON 2026

🎟️ Early Bird rates are available until August 31.

👉 Register today at softconph.com