What does production-ready AI development actually look like in 2026? This event focuses on two critical layers of the AI-native stack: building and maintaining AI skills with the same rigor as production code, and deploying AI workloads on Ubuntu across local, cloud, and Kubernetes environments. Designed for developers and technical leaders who want fewer demos and more repeatable, real-world workflows.

Agenda

18:00 Venue opens
18:30 Talk 1: The missing skills development lifecycle by Dru Knox
19:00 Talk 2: Ubuntu for AI by Jon Seager
19:30 Networking
20:30 THE END

[Talk 1] The missing skills development lifecycle

The new AI-powered software development workflows have exposed a gap in how we build and maintain “skills” compared to traditional software. While context engineering is often treated as an art, it breaks down quickly without the same foundations we rely on for production code.

This session explores why effective context engineering requires a full lifecycle: dependency management to control and evolve context, unit tests to validate behavior, observability to understand real-world execution, and CI/CD to safely iterate and deploy changes. We’ll look at how treating skills as first-class software artifacts changes reliability, collaboration, and scale, and why the lack of this lifecycle is holding teams back today.

Dru Knox, Head of Product & Design at Tessl

Dru Knox is Head of Product & Design at Tessl, where he leads the development of AI-native tools purpose-built for developers. A seasoned product manager, Dru has spent his career working on deeply technical and developer-facing products at companies like Google and Airtable. Over the past several years, he’s focused on machine learning and generative AI at scale, driving product innovation at Grammarly, his own startup, and the AI-native social network Cantina.Dru is passionate about making LLM-powered products that are fast, useful, and intuitive, especially in the codegen space. He brings a thoughtful, pragmatic approach to building tools that serve real developer needs, grounded in experience across both big tech and startups.Outside of work, Dru’s interests include improv comedy, Dungeons & Dragons, and philosophy. His favorite podcasts are Cortex, The Adventure Zone, and Sharp Tech. Originally from Virginia, he’s currently based in London and still counts winter (and snow) as his favorite season.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dru-knox-6b57b830/
Twitter: https://x.com/drufball

[Talk 2] Ubuntu for AI

Ubuntu powers a majority share of today’s AI workloads, from local experimentation to large-scale production clusters. In this session, learn how to make use of Ubuntu’s AI toolchain including CUDA, ROCm, and new inference snaps that let you install silicon-optimised LLMs like DeepSeek R1 or Qwen 2.5 VL with a single command.

The talk will walk through some practical journeys for AI-native developers: starting models locally on Ubuntu, experimenting with agents safely with LXD and deploying applications on Kubernetes. You will leave with concrete workflows and tools you can use immediately to accelerate both development and deployment of AI workloads on Ubuntu.

Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, Ubuntu at Canonical

Jon is VP Engineering, Ubuntu at Canonical, leading the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Foundations and Debcrafters teams. Prior to this, he spent 4 years leading Canonical's Charm Engineering department working on a multi-cloud orchestration engine called Juju, the Operator Framework and a number of teams building operators for the world's most popular open source software.

Jon conceived and led the "Oxidizing Ubuntu" initiative which saw Ubuntu 25.10 become the first large-scale Linux distribution to swap out both their coreutils and sudo implementations for modern, Rust-based alternatives from the uutils project and the Trifecta Tech Foundation.

A technical leader by day, and open source contributor and blogger by night, Jon is an active contributor to the NixOS project, and maintains a blog covering his work on Ubuntu, NixOS, pet software projects and home automation at jnsgr.uk.

Linux, open-source and tech interests aside, Jon is a husband and father, a self-professed pour-over coffee connoisseur and mountain biker.

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jnsgruk
Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@jnsgruk
Blog: https://jnsgr.uk

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Building AI-Native Systems Skills, Infrastructure & Production Workflows