I keynote the Software Architecture Conference 2026 online on Thursday 20 August at 15:50 CEST, which is 13:50 UTC and 09:50 ET. The session streams live.

My talk is about how the hype-cycle is not a factual lie, only a temporal one, and how we should relate to what is happening – again – in our industry.

Keynote:

Twenty-Seven Years of Being Early

Hype is a timeline error... again

Almost everything you are being told about AI right now is true. The timeline is a lie.

I was in the audience at PDC in Los Angeles in October 2008 when Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure. I proceeded to become one of the first experts in a field that was still entirely theoretical, decorated for it fourteen years running, for a war that had not started yet.

I was right about the destination. I was badly, expensively wrong about the timeline.

There is a new generation of experts, this time in AI, collecting the same medals. I recognise the badge. I wore one exactly like it, and I am going to tell them what happens next, because I already lived it.

I will put two hype cycles side by side. What rhymes, what is different this time, and what an architect should actually do about it on Monday morning.