Konstantin Kuznetsov: My Experience on the TechSummit Program Committee
This post was prepared by Konstantin Kuznetsov, Chief Product Officer at AdTech Holding.
Beyond his day-to-day role leading product strategy across the company’s projects, Konstantin is deeply involved in the tech community: both inside and outside AdTech Holding.
He actively organizes and curates internal hackathons for our teams and plays a key role in HackTech, the largest open hackathon in Cyprus, which AdTech Holding has been running for four years in a row.
Across these events, Konstantin has reviewed and helped select hundreds of projects, from early-stage prototypes to production-ready solutions. That experience of evaluating ideas, spotting what’s genuinely useful, and shaping programs that deliver real value to participants, is exactly what he brings to the TechSummit Program Committee. Below, he shares his perspective.
For me, it’s the second year in a row that I serve on the TechSummit Program Committee, and I’m genuinely glad to once again have a say in which talks make it onto the agenda. In this post, I’d like to share what’s so special about this conference, how last year’s event went, and why the upcoming edition is worth keeping on your radar.
TechSummit: Not Your Average Tech Conference
TechSummit first launched in Amsterdam back in 2014 as a meeting point for IT professionals, and has since grown into an international forum with editions in various locations: Amsterdam, Berlin, and the US.
The 2025 event in Amsterdam marked its fifth edition, and was organized by Leaseweb, one of Europe’s largest cloud providers and a key player in the European Cloud Campus initiative – the biggest European cloud infrastructure project to date, aiming to build a truly sovereign European cloud.
Robert van der Meulen, Director Product Strategy at Leaseweb:
“Techsummit is a unique event that is about in-depth technical talks for a technical crowd, without a commercial focus or marketing fluff. This works well because anyone is welcome to propose a presentation, and the programme committee is a group of techies that shapes an agenda focused on technical merits and the most interesting content – we’re super happy with their contribution as they can make or break the day!”
A few things make this event stand out, and I’d specifically highlight:
- Practice over theory. The agenda is curated to feature real engineers solving real problems; not vendor pitches dressed up as talks. I’m particularly proud to be one of the people helping make that principle a reality.
- A single, focused day. No multi-day marathons – just one intense day of keynotes, parallel sessions, lunch, and evening networking. It’s much easier to spare one day off work than to stretch things across two or three more relaxed days.
- A cultural venue, not a corporate hall. Pakhuis de Zwijger sits in the heart of Amsterdam and is a working cultural space that gives the event a truly special atmosphere you won’t find in a generic conference hotel.
- Affordable pricing with a purpose. Tickets start at just €15, and 100% of every ticket goes to Bits of Freedom, a Dutch NGO defending digital rights. You can even choose a higher-tier donation ticket if you’d like to give more. In a world where most conferences are sales funnels in disguise, that’s a pretty clear message about what this event is really about.
That combination of sharp technical content, a great venue, a fair price, and a good cause is exactly why TechSummit has become one of the events I genuinely look forward to every year.
How the Committee Actually Works
As I’ve already mentioned, TechSummit is about practical solutions that work in real, down-to-earth environments, and that’s exactly what the Committee strives to deliver.
Serving on the program committee means several rounds of reviewing submissions, internal discussions with the team, and, ultimately, a final program assembled from the best talks that survived a rigorous selection process.
The job isn’t just to pick good topics – it’s to compose a coherent day where every talk reinforces the bigger picture. And we don’t have the luxury of unlimited time slots spread across several days: the event is one day only, which means every slot has to earn its place.
The key question we ask about every submission is: what will attendees take away from the room and actually apply in their own work?
If there’s a clear answer – the proposal moves forward. If a talk is more about how wonderful Technology X is, rather than how someone actually used it and what came out of it – it doesn’t.
It’s demanding work, but it comes with something valuable in return: a live snapshot of what the industry is grappling with right now. Where the challenges are, where the experiments are happening, and where working answers have already started to emerge.
Why This Matters to Me as a CPO
I’ve spent over 15 years in IT and AdTech, so I have a pretty clear sense of what this job is really about: highload systems, messy distributed architectures, product decisions you have to make while everything is already running under real-world load.
And when you sit down with a hundred submissions from engineers across different companies and countries, something interesting happens. You start to see a very unfiltered picture of the industry: what teams are genuinely struggling with right now, how they’re actually solving it – not in polished presentations for the management, but in production, and where the whole field is heading next.
For someone like me, who’s always chasing new technologies and looking for ways to apply them, that kind of view is gold.
And honestly, it feels great to be able to bring my own experience to the table and help shape a program that people will walk away from with something they can actually use on Monday morning.
And one more thing, because I think it matters: supporting events like this just feels right. TechSummit is exactly the kind of format that deserves to be protected and grown. Great technical events don’t happen by themselves: if you want them to exist, you have to show up and be part of them.
TechSummit 2025: How It Went
Talking about participation – I didn’t only participate in selecting the speakers, but wanted to listen to the actual sessions.
On September 16, 2025, the conference took place under the theme “Building Resiliency at Scale” – all about designing systems that can grow under pressure and not collapse at the worst possible moment.
The lineup of speakers set the tone from the start. Max Adaloudis from ASML shared how machine learning helps predict failures in semiconductor manufacturing, where every minute of unplanned downtime translates into enormous costs.
The parallel tracks covered resilience in microservices (a talk from Booking.com), cloud infrastructure security, Google’s Zanzibar approach to authorization, and, as a separate topic, the security risks of vibe-coding.
Among the speakers were engineers and architects from Booking.com, Thoughtworks, ASML, AxonIQ, and Mercari. These are people who solve complex problems in production and are ready to talk about them honestly. That’s exactly what separates a genuinely useful technical talk from a sales pitch.
Looking back at the day, a few threads tied everything together:
- Resilience starts at the architectural level, not as a patch applied later
- Visibility beats assumption – you can’t protect or scale what you can’t see
- Security at scale is an orchestration problem, not an accumulation one
- Even the best system is only as resilient as the team running it
Or, to borrow a line that kept coming up in one form or another throughout the day: resilience is much more than a good firewall. It’s a mindset that spans code, infrastructure, processes, and people, and in my view, one of the most underrated competitive advantages a tech company can have right now.
What’s Next: TechSummit 2026
The conference returns to Amsterdam on September 30, 2026, and the theme stays the same: Building Resiliency at Scale. That continuity is deliberate – resilience isn’t a trend you cover once and move on from.
With AI systems going into production at unprecedented speed, regulatory pressure tightening across Europe, and infrastructure complexity only growing, the questions around building systems that survive the real world are more relevant than ever.
Here’s how you can get involved:
- Submit a talk. The Call for Presentations is already open at techsummit.io. If you or your colleagues have real, hands-on experience worth sharing: a hard-won lesson from production, a non-obvious architectural decision, a post-mortem that actually taught you something – submit a proposal. We on the committee read every submission carefully, and we’re specifically looking for stories of “how we actually did it,” not “why technology X is amazing.”
- Come as an attendee. Registration is open at the same site. Tickets start at €15, with every euro going to Bits of Freedom, so attending is also a small contribution to digital rights in Europe.
- Bring your team. Honestly, one of the most underrated ways to get value from a conference is to send two or three engineers together. They’ll catch different talks, compare notes over lunch, and bring back a much richer picture than any single person could.
A small tip if you’re coming: skim the agenda in advance and mark two or three sessions you really don’t want to miss. Parallel tracks mean tough choices, and the hallway conversations in between talks are often just as valuable as the talks themselves, so plan for both.
Final Thoughts
After 15+ years in IT and AdTech, I’ve sat through a lot of conferences. Most of them blur together, but a few stick. TechSummit is in that second category for me, and being on the program committee has only reinforced why.
It’s not because of any single talk, or any big-name speaker, or any particular year’s theme. It’s because the whole event is built around a simple, stubborn principle: respect the audience’s time, and only show them things that are actually useful.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: the best technical events don’t just happen. They exist because someone decides to protect the format, curate it with care, and keep saying no to the easy choices. TechSummit is one of those events, and I’m proud to be part of keeping it that way.
See you in Amsterdam on September 30.
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