Talk Proposal: Unlocking CI Performance in the Age of Agentic Development

[stmcallister]

Talk Information

• Draft Title: Unlocking CI Performance in the Age of Agentic Development
• Length:
  • Lighting talk/Demo (10 min)
  • Full Presentation (20 min)
• Links: (slides, article, notes)

• Which dates, particularly Tue/Wed/Thu during the 3rd/4th week of a month, are you likely available? (e.g. "Most Thursdays with 4 weeks notice", "June or later", etc.)
• Short Summary of your talk: Agentic development is changing how fast your team ships — and your CI pipeline is feeling it. More PRs, bigger diffs, more frequent builds. The bottlenecks that used to be minor annoyances are now real blockers. Queue times, cold starts, and network overhead add up fast when your developers are pushing code at a pace that wasn't possible a year ago.

In this session, I'll show you how to look beyond reported build times and find where your pipeline is actually spending its minutes. You'll learn practical techniques for identifying bottlenecks, measuring what matters, and prioritizing the fixes that deliver real impact. I'll share examples from production pipelines where small changes led to big improvements — and explain why optimizing CI is one of the highest-leverage things you can do to get the most out of AI-assisted development. Faster CI means faster feedback loops, happier developers, and more deploys per day.

Speaker Bio

• Name: Scott McAllister
• Mini-bio: Scott is a principal developer advocate at Depot. He has been building software in several industries for over a decade. Now, he's helping others learn about various software development, delivery, and infrastructure principles. When he's not coding, writing, or speaking, he enjoys long walks with his wife, skipping rocks with his kids, and making barbecue sauce!
• Picture for slides: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/4098?v=4
• Would you like help with your presentation? (Feedback on notes, content?)
• Social media link(s):
  • twitter: https://x.com/stmcallister
  • website: https://stmcallister.github.io/
  • linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stmcallister/
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  • I agree