We’ve all felt this before: you’ve been staring at your computer screen for hours. Your eyes are red and blurry. You’re overwhelmed by an overstuffed backlog, juggling on-call alerts, trying to carve out ten quiet minutes just to think.

Meanwhile, the conference you want to attend catches your eye each time you open your calendar. This year it’s Replay. It’s where devs like us finally step out of the weeds and into a room full of people who get it. The place where you hear someone describe the exact failure that’s been blowing up PagerDuty, and suddenly the fix is clear to you. You want to go. You need to go. But first, you’ve got to sell it to your manager.

You and your team know the pain in your bones. But your boss doesn’t feel it the same way. Even if they’re as empathetic as possible, they’re not the one with their hands on the keyboard and their boots on the ground. That disconnect is half the story and the connection is what’s going to get you in the door at Moscone Center in San Francisco, May 5–7, 2026.

The developer-manager disconnect#

The State of Development 2025 report laid it bare:

64% of ICs (individual contributors) say they’re drowning in workload, but only 38% of DMs (decision makers) admit it’s a problem. On infrastructure, it’s almost the same exact split — 53% of ICs call their systems fragile, compared to just 29% of DMs.

That gap is a chasm of misunderstanding. We’re the ones stitching together retries at 2 a.m. and holding our breath every time traffic spikes, while leadership thinks the system is “fine.”

Replay is one of the few places where that gap can close. It’s where you can grab tools and patterns that work, and where your boss gets peace of mind that you’re investing in what’s next instead of only fighting fires.

Why you deserve a ticket#

Don’t go to Replay for free hoodies or time away from Jira. Go because it makes your job better.

The State of Development report showed 71% of developers are craving opportunities to learn new tools and frameworks.

But we keep running into the same blockers: no time, no budget, no air cover. Replay is the antidote.

It’s three full days of accelerated learning, conversations with engineers who’ve already solved the problem you’re staring down, and ideas you can plug back into production immediately.

The alternative? Keep burning out. Keep patching together pipelines. Keep pretending brittle systems are “good enough.” The cost of not sending you is way higher than the flight and ticket.

What to look forward to#

Each year, Replay is chock full of value — talks, a hackathon, workshops, commiserating with your peers about dev issues over lunch — everything you want.

The talks are a big draw, so here’s a quick look back to give you a taste of what to expect. These examples come from earlier this year at Replay 2025. (You can check out the entire playlist of the Replay 2025 videos here).

Salesforce’s “Migrating a monolithic cloud with Temporal”#

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud team faced an Olympic-level migration challenge: moving hundreds of terabytes of tenant data from on-prem data centers to Salesforce’s new Hyperforce platform… all without taking customers offline. Their solution was to orchestrate the entire process with Temporal.

They built migration-as-a-service Workflows that coordinated over 1,200 Activities across 34 Child Workflows, hitting a downtime goal of under 10 minutes per customer. Using Temporal allowed them to parallelize massive SQL migrations, automate rollbacks, and track every operation with heartbeats and retries. What could’ve been a months-long coordination nightmare turned into an elegant, observable system that scaled across thousands of databases.

For developers, this talk is a goldmine on taking something impossibly large and making it reliable, repeatable, and visible. For managers, it’s proof that investing in orchestration is the operational insurance they’re looking for.

Maersk’s “The saga of orchestrating a seamless developer experience”#

Global logistics giant Maersk learned that 70% of its developers’ time wasn’t going into writing code; the team struggled with infrastructure. Spinning up environments could take weeks or even months, strangling innovation and burning cycles on toil instead of shipping business value.

So they set out to fix it. Enter the Developer Experience (DevX) initiative: a company-wide effort to streamline infrastructure delivery, standardize tooling, and build what they called their “golden path.”

By re-architecting their internal developer platform (IDP) around Temporal, Maersk’s engineering team built durable, asynchronous Workflows to power a new Infrastructure API and control plane. Temporal became the invisible engine behind everything from provisioning databases to managing deployment pipelines. This reduced setup times from three months to mere minutes.

With over 3,000 engineers worldwide, Maersk used Temporal to orchestrate complex, multi-team Workflows with reliability, retries, and visibility built in. Temporal made it possible to scale infrastructure provisioning without manual approvals, all while maintaining transparency and debuggability through Temporal’s Workflow UI.

For developers, this talk shows how to kill infrastructure friction and reclaim your time from YAML files and Terraform scripts to actually ship. For managers, it’s proof that developer is a system problem you can fix with orchestration and Durable Execution.

Airwallex’s “Tucking in your legacy tech debt with Temporal”#

When Airwallex, a global fintech unicorn, built its accounting integrations, things got messy. What started as a simple pipeline to sync expenses and receipts turned into a tangled web of Kafka topics, retry queues, and brittle error handling. Developers were spending their time fighting architecture instead of building value, and the system was generating 350+ alerts a year.

Their challenge: improve reliability and velocity without derailing the product roadmap.

By rebuilding their integration layer with Temporal, the Airwallex team untangled the chaos into a clean, durable Workflow. Temporal replaced complex retry queues and rollback logic with transparent orchestration and built-in resilience. In just three weeks, the team migrated from their legacy architecture to a production-ready system; cutting alerts to near zero and improving development speed 6x.

Developers gained a single, readable Workflow file instead of 45 scattered code files, better error recovery through automatic retries and sagas, and easier local testing with Temporal’s replay capabilities. For managers, it’s a model for how to modernize without stopping momentum: a faster, more reliable architecture that makes engineers more productive and systems more stable without a total rewrite.

Making the pitch#

So how do you get a yes? Don’t overcomplicate it; treat it like debugging you’re all too familiar with:

Reproduce the bug: Tell the story of your team’s pain (retry storms, brittle pipelines, endless on-call fatigue). Show the logs: Drop in the State of Development 2025 stats (data gets it done). Propose the fix: Replay is the most efficient way to close knowledge gaps, strengthen the stack, and stop wasting cycles. A few days away from your computer will make a huge difference to your team.

And if your boss still hesitates? Remind them Replay sells out fast. Missing it is your problem, their problem, and a company problem.

Replay 2026 is the room where the people who build the future come to trade notes. Make sure you’re in it.