VF
Victor Frye
Your friendly neighborhood developer
Thank you to the greater Midwest developer community for an exceptional CodeMash 2026! This year, I was honored to speak at this incredible event for the first time, and it was such a joy to attend and connect with so much of the talent and passion from across the region. CodeMash marks the largest conference I have attended to date, and the energy and culture of the event were truly inspiring. I met so many new friends and saw many familiar faces as well. For the first time ever, I met someone who discovered me from this blog in person. I love the Midwest developer community and look forward to returning in the future. Cheers!
This blog post is a reference for those who attended my presentations as well as a thank you letter to everyone involved.
On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of co-hosting and supporting my friend Matt Eland in his four-hour workshop titled "Testing, Evaluating, and Monitoring AI agents using AI Evaluation and OpenTelemetry". This workshop was a deep dive into AI evaluators leveraging Microsoft.Extensions.AI.Evaluation along with OpenTelemetry and Aspire for observability. AI evaluators are going to be vital for building responsible and quality AI solutions moving forward, and the amount of effort putting together any workshop is no small feat. Thank you to Matt for inviting me to assist and for all the hard work he put into making this workshop a success.
One exciting callout is how this workshop leveraged Aspire to orchestrate the entire workshop solution so attendees could focus on the evaluation code itself instead of the scaffolding of multiple lessons as code.
Some additional helpful links and resources from the workshop include:
I also presented a general session on Thursday titled "Diet Docker: Crafting lightweight containers with multi-stage builds". The session focused on an overview of container build tools, a quick dive into multi-stage builds, and impacts of Linux distributions on container size and security. I used .NET containers for sample apps due to my own familiarity, how well .NET build lifecycle aligns with multi-stage builds, and the variety of official .NET container images available. For those interested in learning more or finding the resources available, I recommend reading more here on my blog and following along as I continue to explore containers. Some helpful links and resources include:
I want to give a special thank you to my employer, Leading EDJE, for sponsoring my attendance at CodeMash 2026. Leading EDJE is a fantastic place to work, and I am grateful for their support in allowing me to attend and speak at this event. We had a total of 12 employees attending CodeMash this year, 3 of which including myself presented sessions. Although not a direct sponsor of the event, I love seeing Leading EDJE invest in the professional development of their employees and fostering a culture of learning and growth that outputs so many speakers and community contributors.
Thank you again if you attended my presentations or any of the other amazing sessions at CodeMash 2026. Attendees are why we all put so much effort into conferences, as speakers, sponsors, and organizers. Also thank you to the organizers and volunteers who made this event possible. And a special thank you to the sponsors. These are the companies helping to make this event happen and investing in the future Midwestern developer community: