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Architect Building 2026: Investing in the Next Generation of Software Architects

The role of a software architect today extends far beyond technical expertise. Architects are increasingly expected to communicate effectively with clients, facilitate technical discussions, support pre-sales activities, and translate complex technological concepts into clear business value. With this in mind, Levi9 once again organized Architect Building, a development program designed for experienced engineers who are preparing for architectural roles and looking to broaden their skill set.

The program combined technical topics, communication and presentation skills development, hands-on workshops, and practical business scenarios. Through interactive sessions, case studies, and knowledge-sharing activities, participants explored architectural thinking, solution evaluation, architecture visualization, quality attributes, and the use of AI throughout the software development lifecycle.

A key part of the program was learning from real-life project and sales experiences shared by Levi9 architects and experts. Rather than focusing solely on theory, participants were challenged to think through practical situations they are likely to encounter in client-facing and architectural roles.

 

As participant Svjetlana Ninić explains:

“One of the most valuable parts of the program was hearing real-world experiences and lessons learned from architects involved in sales activities. Those practical stories provided insights that are difficult to gain elsewhere and helped us better prepare for similar situations ourselves.”

In addition to strengthening technical and communication skills, the program created opportunities for participants from different teams and locations to collaborate, exchange experiences, and build relationships that will support future projects and pre-sales activities.

 

For participant László Soós, this was one of the most valuable outcomes of the program:

“Before the program, I hardly knew any of the participants. By the end, I had built valuable connections that I am sure will lead to even better collaboration in the future.”

Throughout the program, participants worked on presentation skills, storytelling, stakeholder communication, and the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. Practical exercises and presentations allowed them to apply newly acquired knowledge while receiving continuous feedback from mentors and peers.

 

According to mentor Petar Damjanović:

“The Architect Building Program proved to be a highly successful and valuable experience for everyone involved. In addition to strengthening architectural thinking, the program placed a strong emphasis on the soft skills required to operate effectively as an architect.”

Architect Building is another example of ours commitment to continuous learning and professional growth. By creating opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and practical experience, the program helps prepare future architects to approach new challenges with greater confidence, clarity, and impact.

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9 July 2026
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Hope is not a Strategy

Companies, nowadays, establish good decision-making competency as a company value. Good decision-making skills get assessed in almost every software engineering hiring or performance review process. This, not so highly available commodity among representatives of any profession, software engineers included, is at core of success at any level in the organization and success of the company itself.   

The rate of changes in business environments, the level of demand for “stuff that works” and its complexity is constantly increasing. Increased pressure on solution providers in the Software and Data Science engineering domains results in a privileged status of these engineers in demand. It’s another confirmation of the common wisdom that ” Knowledge is power”. The capacity to learn and apply new grasped knowledge is already the most wanted currency in the industry.  

In the hour of need, everyone relies on leaders to lead toward astounding triumphs. The solution provider heroes will be apprised and celebrated. Others will fade into oblivion and eventually extinction. Automation and Artificial Intelligence at scale, the common solution ingredients today, are raising the bar for good decision competency.    

How to increase chances to stay in this privileged group of good decision makers in the future, how to grasp knowledge and how not to rely on hope predominantly, is in the essence of this talk.

<speaker/>

About The Speaker

Sigurdur Birgisson

Sigurdur Birgisson is Quality Leader for the IKEA Planning Experiences, the interactive tools that customers and co-workers worldwide use online and in the IKEA stores. Sigurdur drives quality strategies across all products, enabling development teams to deliver high quality software. With a background at Atlassian and Jayway, he coaches development teams on building quality from the start, rather than trying to test and fix things after the fact. As a speaker, he has presented at several international conferences: Agile 2012, CAST 2012, Agile testing days 2012 and Nordic testing days 2019, as examples.

<sessionsinfo/>

12:15-13:15

Tangible Software Quality

About The Speaker

Conference MC: Vanja Al-Halidi

Vanja Al-Halidi likes to emphasize that he has been part of the IT industry since the last century. He commenced his career as a programmer and has now evolved into an adept IT Project Manager, boasting over 15 years of progressive experience across various levels of IT organizations. Within Levi9 IT Services, a Dutch company, Vanja serves as a Delivery Lead, overseeing diverse projects for clients and heading a team of Delivery Managers in Belgrade. Additionally, he has moderated numerous events within the company. 
“Learning never stops” epitomizes the philosophy at Levi9 Academy. For Vanja, this motto signifies not just certifying one’s knowledge but also sharing it with others. He holds esteemed certificates like Professional Scrum Master™, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Certified SAFe® Agilist, among others. At Levi9, he conducts training sessions on Scrum and User Story Mapping. As a lecturer, he has imparted his expertise to many students, including those in high school. Currently, Vanja is engaged in a similar capacity at the Faculty of Mathematics, contributing to the course “Classical and Agile Approaches to Project Management in the IT Industry.” 

About The Speaker

Jelena Pavlović

Jelena is the founder of Koučing Centar and Associate professor of Work Psychology at the University of Belgrade. She is enthusiastic about research on team effectiveness research and practice. Jelena has authored a book on coaching psychology published by Routledge. 

<sessionsinfo/>

16:45-17:30

Team effectiveness: What do we know? 

About The Speaker

Luka Aničin

Luka has been deeply immersed in machine learning and artificial intelligence for the past six years. Throughout his illustrious career, he has collaborated with international clients, deploying these technologies to address challenges faced by millions of users. The Google Developer Group recognizes Luka as one of the 150 Machine Learning Experts. Beyond engineering, Luka has a keen interest in education. Since founding a company in 2019 dedicated to this cause, it has educated over 300,000 people around the world. Currently, Luka is a Data Strategy and Machine Learning consultant at his company, Datablooz, and is completing a PhD in applied artificial intelligence.

<sessionsinfo/>

11:00-11:45

Let’s walk together through an AI project 

About The Speaker

Žolt Varga

Žolt Varga has a decade of experience in the IT industry across various technologies and roles. He currently serves as a Mobile Software Architect at Levi9. He is passionate about System Design, Research and Development, and innovative technologies. Žolt finds joy in sharing knowledge through coaching, mentoring, and exchanging experiences. Sometimes during the coffee breaks, sometimes in the form of tech writing on platforms such as Medium and Website. Recently, as an introvert stepping out of his comfort zone by public speaking at conferences and meetups. His career commenced in gaming, where he started as a ninja – generalist and R&D developer. He later shifted his focus to the Mobile, Cloud, and Security domains. Beyond software architecture and development, Žolt’s curiosity extends to the IoT (Internet of Things) and home automation. To clear his mind and get some inspiration, Žolt likes to go for a bike ride or a walk with his dog, snowboarding, kitesurfing, traveling, and exploring new experiences. 

<sessionsinfo/>

16:15-16:45

Trends and the Future of Augmented Reality 

About The Speaker

Jovana Milanović & Marina Zvicer

Jovana Milanovic applies her 8 years of substantial QA experience to her role as a Test Lead, effectively guiding her teams through various large and long-term projects across different business domains. Through these experiences, she has learned how to optimally utilize her role so that her teams achieve exceptional results in software delivery. She likes to consider herself a “Jack of All Trades and Master of One”.   

 

Marina Zvicer is a Test Lead with 7 years of experience in the IT industry. Although her initial interest lay in frontend development, she soon realized that a testing role better suited her curiosity and desire to be involved in all phases of software development. Her passion is to be a team player who can organize people efficiently, in order to deliver the highest quality software. 

<sessionsinfo/>

14:45-15:15

Quality Quest – Elevating Software Excellence

from Epics Creation to Epic Application 

About The Speaker

Edwin van Andel

Edwin van Andel started hacking at the age of 13. Although he is now CTO of hacker company Zerocopter, his relationship with the hacker community is still the main driving force in his life. His dream, to bring the brilliant minds of all hackers he knows together in one room and to hack everything, is something that he is getting closer and closer to. In addition, together with the “Guild of Grumpy Old Hackers”, he is actively guiding and leading young hackers in the right direction in order to create his ultimate goal – a safe society through a safer internet. Next to all this he is known as the organizer of Defcon group Defcon3120 (Amsterdam) and from Darknet Diaries episode 87 – Hacking Trumps’ twitter in 2016. 

<sessionsinfo/>

15:15-16:00

How to break the police bodycams for fun and

pizza? 

About The Speaker

Radovan Baćović

Radovan Baćović is a Staff Data Engineer at GitLab coming from Serbia, an experienced Data Engineer and a “wannabe” the best bad Conference speaker. He is forever eager to discover new data technologies in an agile environment. He has armed himself with a profound application development background in large international companies around the globe, with a strong focus on the open-source community. Radovan is a passionate data geek delighted to share his long mileage and experience with a broader audience. He has been trapped in the Data world for almost 20 years. Outside of work, he is a devoted Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. 

<sessionsinfo/>

12:15-13:00

When nimble is not fast enough: Will AI and

Data leverage your DevSecOps journey 

About The Speaker

Florian Rappl

Dr. Florian Rappl is a solution architect from Germany who specializes in the creation of scalable distributed web applications. These days he almost exclusively works on micro frontend solutions. He has authored a book on the topic and actively engages in workshops both at conferences and directly for companies. Florian is a long-time Microsoft MVP in the development tools area. 

<sessionsinfo/>

13:00-13:45

Multiple Ships to the Island – Micro Frontends & 

Island Architectures 

About The Speaker

Kevlin Henney

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer. His development interests lie in programming, practice, and people. He has been a columnist for several magazines and sites, has contributed to both open- and closed-source software (sometimes unintentionally), and has been on far too many committees (it has been said that “a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled”). He is a co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also the editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know. 

<sessionsinfo/>

10:00-11:00

Software Is Details – KEYNOTE SPEECH 

Team effectiveness: What do we know?

The field of research and practice on team effectiveness is constantly evolving. 

We will tackle empirical studies on what works in high-performing teams and the implications of these studies for everyday practice in organizations. 

Some topics will include six conditions of high-performing teams, the role of different leader personalities in different team cultures, and what marks successful team communication patterns. 

Jelena Pavlović

<speaker/>

Trends and the Future of Augmented Reality

Rapid technological advances are changing how we interact with the world around us. Augmented Reality is one of the most exciting technologies shaping our future. 

In this journey, we’ll unravel the evolution of Augmented Reality. 

We will look at the current state and the advancement of AR-used hardware, software, and services and how it can be applied in real life. 

We will share our experience and demonstrate number of practical cases, so you have better insight into how your solution can benefit from it. 

Together we will explore the future of AR and how to prepare for it. 

As big tech companies carve out their own respective visions for the future of AR, it’s never been more important to visualize the possibilities of AR merging with geospatial services, transforming how we perceive and interact with our world. 

Žolt Varga

<speaker/>

How to break the police bodycams for fun and pizza?

The Dutch police has been trying to collaborate with ‘private partners’, including the Dutch hacker community in the Netherlands, for years now (the great Public Private Partnership or PPP), with mild success. So when they asked us what they could organize to get to know us, we replied with “invite us to hack police sh*t and eat pizza’s”. We thought we would never hear from them again. Surprise surprise, they eventually invited us in. So we created a team consisting of brilliant hard- and software hackers from the Dutch hacking community and went to the Amsterdam police station to try and hack some of their obsolete bodycams. Did we succeed? Come and find out and prepare to roll laughing on the floor! This talk is part of annual Levi9 Secure9 conference.

Edwin van Andel

<speaker/>

Quality Quest – Elevating Software Excellence from Epics Creation to Epic Application

As technology enthusiasts and avid users of various applications, we all seek that elusive feeling of delight when we encounter software that works seamlessly, boasting impeccable design and logical flows. But how often does that experience truly materialize? 

Join us in this captivating IT conference talk as we shine a spotlight on the crucial elements that demand meticulous assessment throughout the software development process. Through real-life examples, we will unravel the essential activities that enhance software and development process quality across all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). 

Our ultimate objective is to equip you with fresh insights that will not only accelerate your career growth but also broaden your horizons, enabling you to delegate tasks more efficiently and foster effective collaboration at every stage of development. Let us redirect our focus towards “building the right thing” and ensure that our customers encounter fewer bugs, transforming software development into a true Quality Quest. 

Jovana Milanović & Marina Zvicer

<speaker/>

Multiple Ships to the Island – Micro Frontends & Island Architectures

In the last year, new frameworks have emerged or gained popularity, making use of the island architecture, a paradigm that aims to reduce the volume of JavaScript shipped through “islands” of interactivity that can be independently delivered on top of otherwise static HTML.

Many people started to confuse this pattern with micro frontends – which are all about scaling the development of a web application. Now, we have two patterns – one to scale the performance of a website and another one to scale the development. It turns out – they are not mutually exclusive.

In this talk, micro frontend expert Dr. Florian Rappl will introduce both architectural styles and show how they can be combined to create outstanding web experiences that scale not only in development but also in usage.

Florian Rappl

<speaker/>

When nimble is not fast enough: Will AI and Data leverage your DevSecOps journey

In the modern Data and Tech world, you should either live under a rock or have someone cut off electricity in your apartment to avoid any significant interaction with AI. 

A great chance to gain the experience of DevSecOps and Data stories directly from the producers of a well-known and trusted DevSecOps platform with more than 30 million users. I firmly believe that a story can aid and inspire an audience to try to do extraordinary things in their data world. Thrilled to have a chance to reveal a few answers together with you: 

  • What is the effect of the beautiful friendship between Data and the DevSecOps platform? 
  • How does leveraging the data offer developers throttle in their daily work and keep them prevented from a headache and bad mood? 
  • What should put a smile on people’s faces – does anyone mention productivity? 
  • Is AI your best friend or your worst nightmare (or both) on the developer journey – the question is so pathetic, but the judgment will be more enjoyable, I pledge. 

Forget about hypes and buzzwords; let’s see AI in action making a developer’s life easier and super-efficient, with a small help of data, of course. 

Radovan Baćović

<speaker/>

Let’s walk together through an AI project

This presentation aims to demystify the journey of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) project by walking through its lifecycle example—from problem identification to deployment. 

We’ll discuss essential steps such as data collection, model selection, training, evaluation, and scaling, offering insights for newcomers and seasoned practitioners. 

By the end of this session, attendees will have a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to bring an AI project from concept to completion. 

Luka Aničin

<speaker/>

Software Is Details – KEYNOTE SPEECH

“It’s just a detail.” Have you ever said that or been told that? Whether it’s about implementation or requirements, we often use the word detail to suggest that something is not important enough to worry about.

There are so many things to worry about in software development that we need to prioritize — too much detail, and not enough focus. The problem is that within software, the details matter because that’s what software is: lots of details brought together in combination. If we don’t focus on the details, we get debt, defects, and delay.

Kevlin Henney

<speaker/>

About The Speaker

Mirjana Kolarov

Mirjana was a test architect for years and now she is in the role of Delivery Director at Levi9. After gaining diverse experience in testing she concluded that she needs to give it back to the community, so she co-founded the first testing community in Serbia, as a platform for sharing knowledge. Somewhere in parallel, she started her international speaking career at different testing and development conferences. She is a passionate and highly motivated software tester who loves getting her hands dirty with actual testing and leads by example, promoting leadership and testing skills and techniques for 14 years, and counting.

<sessionsinfo/>

15:00-15:45

When Monitoring falls in love with Observability 

About The Speaker

Alex DeBrie

Alex is an AWS Data Hero and self-employed AWS consultant and trainer. He is the author of The DynamoDB Book, a comprehensive guide to data modeling with DynamoDB. Previously, he worked for Stedi and for Serverless, Inc., creators of the Serverless Framework. He loves being involved in the AWS & serverless community, and he lives in Omaha (Nebraska) with his family. 

Website:  https://www.alexdebrie.com/

<sessionsinfo/>

15:45-16:30

Thinking Serverless in your Architecture 

About The Speaker

Dejan Dimić

As a passionate software engineering hobbyist, Dejan Dimić is acting in different roles, from software engineer to VP of engineering, while working with creative, smart and hardworking people in companies like Glovo, Amazon, Telenor, Smith Micro Software, etc. where he was privileged to observe progress and to shape the software industry for the last 20+ years. Nowadays, he is heavily engaged in Experimentation, MLP, low-code, IoT and serverless technology topics while investing his time in managing teams, growing talents and mentoring. 

<sessionsinfo/>

10:15-11:00

Hope is not a Strategy 

About The Speaker

Vanja Tešin

Vanja Tešin is a builder looking for ways to help his team and others spend more time on what they enjoy the most – creating value for their customers by building great software. Worked both in outsourcing and product-based companies, observed how different software businesses approach building the same end product – great software – and tried to distill what he believes should bring the best out of teams, the company they work for, and the customers they serve. 

<sessionsinfo/>

11:00-11:45

How to safely release at scale? 

About The Speaker

Viktor Farčić

Viktor Farčić is a Developer Advocate at Upbound, a member of the Google Developer Experts, CDF Ambassadors, and Docker Captains groups, and a published author. He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit and a co-host of DevOps Paradox. 

<sessionsinfo/>

13:15-14:00

Applying GitOps To Everything 

About The Speaker

Gojko Adžić

Gojko Adžic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP. He is one of the 2019 AWS Serverless Heroes, the winner of the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award, and the 2011 Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Award. Gojko’s book Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010. As a consultant, Gojko has helped companies around the world improve their software delivery, from some of the largest financial institutions to small innovative startups. Gojko specializes in agile and lean quality improvement, in particular impact mapping, agile testing, specification by example and behavior driven development. Author of Running Serverless, Impact Mapping, Specification by Example and a few more books… Working on Narakeet. 

Website: https://gojko.net/ 

<sessionsinfo/>

12:15-13:15

Tangible Software Quality

Thinking Serverless in your Architecture

Serverless applications are becoming a popular architectural pattern for development teams from startups to large enterprises. These architectures provide agility, reliability, and scalability that is difficult to find elsewhere. But building serverless applications requires new architectural patterns and development practices. In this talk, we’ll look at what serverless architectures are and how you should use them. We’ll dive deep into features you should look for in your architectural components and those you should avoid.

Alex DeBrie

<speaker/>

When Monitoring falls in love with Observability

Users have funny and unpredictable ways of using a product. That is a fact, not an assumption. Can we even think of all those wacky patterns upfront? Functional and performance tests are our way of trying to mitigate them, but are we aware of how our system behaves on production? What happens when the product we build goes finally “live”? Do we observe what is happening with it? Are we learning from our observations? 

I’ll share a story about how my daily job used to consist of monitoring our system in production and learning from it. Some of the lessons that we found along the way are: 
– oracles for our performance tests 
– learning about system behavior 
– observing (potential) errors in the systems 
– preventing bugs from getting to users before we fix them 
I’ll show you which tools we used and how we used them and what we could see by observing them all together, because one tool is never enough. 

Mirjana Kolarov

<speaker/>

Applying GitOps To Everything

You are likely already using GitOps for your applications, but not for everything else. You are likely not using Argo CD, Flux, Rancher Fleet, or similar tools to manage the state of your infrastructure and services. Why is that? If GitOps is a great solution for apps, isn’t it safe to assume that it would be equally beneficial for anything else? What is missing?  

The problem is that most of the commonly used GitOps tools are managing Kubernetes resources which, traditionally, do not deal with infrastructure and Cloud services. That’s what we need to change. We need to expand Kubernetes with custom resources that can manage anything, no matter whether that’s AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, GitHub, Elastic, DataDog, or any other Cloud service. If we do that, we might convert Kubernetes API into a universal API. We might convert the Kubernetes control plane into a universal control plane. If we do that, we will get end-to-end GitOps through which everything is always in sync and where all we have to do is push changes to Git repositories.  

All we need to make that happen is Crossplane (an open-source project donated to CNCF), combined with Argo CD, Flux, or Rancher Fleet. Let’s see it in action.  

Viktor Farčić

<speaker/>

Tangible Software Quality – KEYNOTE SPEECH

What quality aspects can even be captured by testing, and what types of quality activities need to happen in development, or after deployment? Does a bug count really show quality? How much manual testing do we need to do, and what should we automate? How to make sure that all the key business values are properly represented and evaluated during delivery?   

These are fundamental questions that any software team needs to answer, but it’s very difficult to find a good strategy for all this complexity. Sigurdur and Gojko will present a model for making software quality tangible to all the stakeholders, with an example from the IKEA Planning Experiences team.  

You will learn how to facilitate a conversation about what high quality delivery means for your organization, and how to create your own tangible software quality model that will capture all the important business and technical metrics and risks.  

Gojko Adžić

Sigurdur Birgisson

<speakers/>

How to safely release at scale?

Ever thought you could be releasing to your customers faster, safer, and with complete control?

A lot has been said about what you can, and usually do, during development and testing, but what about when your latest feature or a bug fix goes through CI/CD, reaches customers, and you realize you need more fine-grained control?

In this talk, I would like to share some learnings that you can apply at every step of the way to make sure you can take action when needed.

Vanja Tešin

<speaker/>

Tangible Software Quality – KEYNOTE SPEECH

What quality aspects can even be captured by testing, and what types of quality activities need to happen in development, or after deployment? Does a bug count really show quality? How much manual testing do we need to do, and what should we automate? How to make sure that all the key business values are properly represented and evaluated during delivery?   

These are fundamental questions that any software team needs to answer, but it’s very difficult to find a good strategy for all this complexity. Sigurdur and Gojko will present a model for making software quality tangible to all the stakeholders, with an example from the IKEA Planning Experiences team.  

You will learn how to facilitate a conversation about what high quality delivery means for your organization, and how to create your own tangible software quality model that will capture all the important business and technical metrics and risks.

Gojko Adžić

Sigurdur Birgisson

<speakers/>