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home > events > software-should-work-2026 · Jul 16, 2026
software should worksswcolumbia motiger hotelreliabilitycorrectnessformal methodsdeterministic simulationantithesishillel waynerichard hippalexis kingandrew kelleyfilip pizlomarianne bellottilorin hochsteinisaac van doren

Software Should Work 2026
The Tiger Hotel, Columbia MO, July 16–17

Table of Contents

Logistics

  • When: July 16–17, 2026
  • Where: voco The Tiger Hotel, 23 S 8th St, Columbia, MO 65201
  • Organizer: Isaac Van Doren (isaac@softwareshouldwork.com)
  • Format: single-track, in-person
  • Tickets: $499 early bird (until 2026-03-13), $599 standard; $150 student discount
  • Airports: Columbia Regional (COU) direct; St. Louis (STL) with shuttle
  • Reception: Thursday evening at Logboat Brewing
  • Sponsors: Antithesis, RWX, Redbud VC, ParadeDB

Sources

  • softwareshould.work — official conference page.
  • Announced via Hillel Wayne's newsletter (buttondown.com/hillelwayne) post "I'm still alive", 2026-07-16.

Overview

An independent, small-format conference on software reliability organized by Isaac Van Doren. The speaker set spans language-runtime authors (Kelley/Zig, Hipp/SQLite, Feldman/Roc, Pizlo/Fil-C), formal methods (Wayne, Helwer/TLA+), reliability practice (Hochstein/chaos, Bellotti/safety-critical), and design-for-correctness (King/parse-don't- validate). Antithesis is a headline sponsor and has an engineer on program (John Murray on Nix in production), placing this event adjacent to BugBash 2026 in the reliability-conference cluster.

Schedule

Thursday, July 16

  • 09:00 — Welcome and opening remarks
  • 09:15 — Andrew Kelley (Zig) — Don't Take the Black Pill
  • 10:00 — Richard Hipp (SQLite) — Reliability Lessons From SQLite
  • 11:15 — Alexis King — The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Constructive Data Modeling
  • 13:30 — Hillel Wayne — How to Find Bugs in Systems That Don't Exist
  • 14:15 — John Murray (Antithesis) — Derivations to Deployments: Practical Nix in Production
  • 15:30 — Delaney Gillilan (Datastar) — Put State in the Right Place, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
  • 16:15 — Lightning talks:
    • Andrew Helwer (TLA+, MS Azure Storage) — How Good Are the Go & Rust Concurrency Checkers?
    • Tommy Graves (RWX) — Building Docker Images Faster by Changing the Dockerfile
    • Erin Swenson-Healey (Hadrian) — Tightly Couple Your Client to Your Server: Type-Safe, In-Process, Full-Stack Tests
    • Trevor Settles — I Just Wanted a Non-Blurry Screen Magnifier
    • Jayaprabhakar Kadarkarai (FizzBee) — Why You Should Create Your Own DSLs in the AI Era
    • Tilman Roeder (Jane Street) — Be Careful When Improving Performance
    • Tom Wheeler (Temporal) — How Temporal Achieves Durable Execution
  • 20:00 — Reception at Logboat Brewing

Friday, July 17

  • 09:00 — Richard Feldman (Roc, Zed) — Dependency Cultures
  • 09:45 — Marianne Bellotti — System Daydreams and Logarithmic Colored Glasses
  • 11:00 — Ray Myers (Craft vs Cruft) — Code Worth Writing
  • 13:15 — Filip Pizlo (Fil-C, Roblox) — Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out!
  • 14:00 — Lorin Hochstein (Airbnb) — Saturation: How Your Software Will Fail at Scale
  • 15:15 — Carson Gross (HTMX, Montana State) — AI & The University
  • 16:00 — Closing remarks

Talks worth pulling later

Once slides / recordings are out, these are the ones adjacent to the current corpus and worth writing back into research notes:

  • Wayne — Bugs in Systems That Don't Exist — natural sibling to the Practical TLA+ / annotation-methodology thread.
  • Helwer — Go & Rust concurrency checkers — pair with the formal-methods work; TLA+ concurrency comparisons.
  • King — Constructive Data Modeling — parse-don't-validate is a through-line in the site's design-for-correctness posts.
  • Pizlo — Fil-C — memory-safe C toolchain; relevant to the agent-safety-boundary thread.
  • Murray — Nix in production — Antithesis's Nix pipeline; adjacent to the deterministic-simulation posts around BugBash.
  • Hochstein — Saturation — chaos engineering at Airbnb scale.

Adjacencies to current work

  • BugBash 2026 — Antithesis's own reliability conference; SSW is the same audience with a broader vendor-neutral posture.
  • Annotation Systems Spec — Wayne's talk on "bugs in systems that don't exist" is thematically adjacent.
  • Roc / Zig / SQLite / Fil-C — the language-runtime thread already runs through several notes; add cross-links after talks are seen.

Open questions / TODO

  • [ ] Attend or watch recordings; capture Wayne, Helwer, King, Murray talks first.
  • [ ] Confirm whether recordings will be publicly posted (single-track independent conferences vary).
  • [ ] Cross-link Antithesis talks (Murray + BugBash 2026).
  • [ ] Add to Q3 2026 in site/events/index.org Upcoming/2026 lists.