Our LDX3 New York 2026 Picks

Back in 2019, I gave my first-ever conference talk from the LeadDev NYC stage, The future of cross-platform is Native. I wrote about my journey from CFP to Stage and it remains one of the best professional experiences I’ve had. I fully intended to keep coming back, but then COVID happened, and somehow six years slipped by. This year, I had the opportunity to review CFP submissions for LDX3, and I’m super excited to be back as an attendee.

LDX3 is a leadership conference and AI is reshaping engineering judgment, team structure, and technical decision-making everywhere. Whether you’re running a backend org or mobile teams juggling Android, iOS, and shared Kotlin, there’s a lot to look forward to.

What Touchlab is Excited About

The State of the Software Engineering Industry

Top of our list is Gergely Orosz’s opening keynote. Touchlab sponsored and contributed to the Kotlin Multiplatform section of his book, Building Mobile Apps at Scale, and we continue to follow The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter closely. Gergely has a track record of well-researched and highly valuable content of where the industry actually stands, so we’re looking forward to his read on where software and AI engineering are heading next.

Protecting Innovation Under Pressure

For Touchlab’s entire history, we’ve been balancing open source tooling and internal R&D against client delivery. Our clients want to move toward more modern mobile apps and development practices, whether that means adopting KMP, CMP, or a new platform API from Android or iOS. Touchlab engineers have to keep their expertise at the leading edge while meeting our clients’ delivery timeline, contributing to the ecosystem, and interacting with the community. Kabir Sikand’s practical loop for creating room to innovate without losing momentum is directly applicable to how we work.

Evaluating AI Developer Tools Without the Drama

There’s a clear parallel here to evaluating KMP and CMP without the drama. This is something we’ve written about, spoken about, and are always looking to learn more about. We’re excited to hear Christina Chan’s metrics-driven framework and see how it compares to how we think and what it might change about how we think.

Talks I’m Personally Excited About

The Manager’s Path in the Age of AI

I bought Camille Fournier’s first book, The Manager’s Path, when it came out, and it genuinely changed how I manage. So a talk from her on which management skills AI is actually changing, and which ones stay non-negotiable, is an easy pick for me personally.

The 30 Minute MBA for Engineering Leaders

My role is primarily business-facing, and I spend a lot of it coaching engineers who are trying to champion KMP inside their own orgs on exactly the kinds of fundamentals around the financial and commercial logic that makes or breaks their pitch to upper-management. I look forward to Emily Nakashima’s talk giving me new insights to put into practice.

AI’s Impact on Touchlab Engineering

Touchlab’s engineers are embracing the shifts caused by AI entering the SDLC. We’ve built skills for KMP, built orchestrated agentic tooling for porting apps from one platform to another, and we carefully leverage AI to get up to speed quickly on client codebases. We’ve also had to set policy and guidelines for better AI output, using AI securely, and keeping costs down. In the process we’ve seen first-hand where AI excels or struggles and when to let it drive, assist, or stay out of the loop entirely. As the tools get better, we keep re-evaluating them. Three talks speak directly to this:

• Re-engineering the Software Development Playbook - Marcel Weekes on how AI is pushing bottlenecks upstream into planning and communication.
• The Real Impact of AI on Software Engineering - Dan Moore, cutting through the hype to what’s actually changing.
• Honing the Right Engineering Skills in the Age of AI - Kaya Thomas on designing work, so engineers grow where human judgment still wins.

Honorable Mentions

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Distributed Systems - Jez Humble distilling 25 years of distributed-systems lessons down to “teams (the real distributed systems)”. Teams working across Android, iOS, and web codebases have more in common with a distributed system than most orgs realize.
• Startup Made, Enterprise Grade - Frances Thai on how small teams ship enterprise-ready features is very relevant to Touchlab. We are a relatively small team shipping high-stakes codebases constantly for both startups and the enterprise.

See You There

Sam and I are not just excited about watching great talks and meeting the speakers, we’re also excited to talk to other amazing leaders in attendance. We’ll be at LDX3 both days (September 15th & 16th) so if you’re around, say hello.