CTO Community Events

🚀 Masterclass Announcement – with Wiz

After the community vote on Jan 13, the decision was clear: 👉 AI usage in the threat landscape wins.

Together with Wiz, we’re hosting a hands-on masterclass on Jan 29, 2026, focused on how AI is actually changing real-world attacks — and what this means for security leaders.

🧠 Topic: AI Usage in the Threat Landscape

🔍 Real incidents as our lens to understand how attackers use (and don’t use) AI today, where risk is concentrating in modern cloud environments, and how security teams can keep pace.

🎤 Speaker: Rami McCarthy Principal Security Researcher, Wiz Formerly building and scaling security programs at Figma and Cedar

📌 What to expect: 🤖 AI-powered attacker behavior in practice ☁️ Emerging AI-driven risk in cloud environments 🛡️ Security priorities as adversary tactics evolve

📅 When: 6PM | Jan 29, 2026 💻 Where: Online

Unwind with fellow CTOs, share insights, and enjoy great food & drinks in an exclusive atmosphere in Frankfurt city!

Unwind with fellow CTOs, share insights, and enjoy great food & drinks in an exclusive atmosphere in Hamburg city!

Unwind with fellow CTOs, share insights, and enjoy great food & drinks in an exclusive atmosphere in Berlin city!

Great tech talks, tasty brews, and Oktoberfest energy — hang with us at the Schottenhammel tent for the 2026 alphalist CTOktoberfest!

The CTO & Architect’s Guide to Modern Observability

Ever struggled with incidents that take hours to diagnose or worse, failures you only learn about from customers?

In this masterclass, we’ll cover:

1. Why traditional monitoring breaks down in modern distributed, cloud, and AI-driven systems

2. The foundations of modern observability—metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and how they connect

3. How AI transforms operations, from anomaly detection to predictive incident prevention

4. How to design a scalable observability architecture, including multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and enterprise integrations

5. A look into AI observability—data drift, model degradation, and monitoring ML pipelines

Key takeaway: You’ll learn how to evolve from reactive monitoring to proactive and predictive reliability engineering—while improving performance, reducing costs, and strengthening engineering velocity.

Ever tried to ship a small feature and it takes a month? Dev server takes forever to start, CI constantly broken, half of the releases get reverted. Sounds familiar? Lets fix that.

In this masterclass we will cover:

• Why developer velocity slows down as orgs grow
• Immediate wins - e.g. how removing merge queues can double merges
• Long-term strategies - like using microfrontends to split and scale
• How to decide if microfrontends are the right fit for your org

Key takeaway: Learn how to keep your teams fast - no matter how big your codebase or company gets.

Speaker: Mark Knichel, Principal Software Engineer at Vercel

Level up as a CTO at our annual CTO Summit. Lunch starts at 1 pm, followed by rapid-fire insights from top engineers and leaders.

At 6:30 pm, we hop on a bus from Kinopolis to Bullerei for dinner and drinks — a relaxed setting to connect with fellow CTOs. With code.talks speakers in the mix, expect top-tier ideas and conversations.

This is our Monthly AI Roundtable to talk about the latest in Topics and discoveries around agentic software development, agents ind general and applied AI Systems.

Great tech talks, tasty brews, and Oktoberfest energy — hang with us at the Schottenhammel tent for the 2025 alphalist CTOktoberfest!

Unwind with fellow CTOs, share insights, and enjoy great food & drinks in an exclusive atmosphere in Berlin city!

82% of developers use AI daily, but only 28% trust the output, why? In this masterclass we will cover:

❌ Vibe coding: random prompts, messy code, frustrated teams ☑️ Agentic software engineering: systematic methodology, quality gates, 10x productivity 🛠️ Live demo: Building AI colleague profiles for your actual codebase 💡 Shift from tool to colleague: AI that understands your architecture 🎯 Measure and optimize efficiency gains in your daily workTransform how your team works with AI through proven engineering practices.

This isn't magic, it's systematic engineering.

Discover why FinOps is more than just cost-cutting. You will hear how it can be applied to help organizations align cloud spend with real business goals for higher impact. Learn a practical framework that empowers teams to understand not just what is being optimized, but why—ensuring every cloud decision drives value without sacrificing performance or progress.

🔍 Get practical insights into FinOps principles, personas, maturity, and operational phases 📊 Get actionable steps for aligning with KPIs, reviewing workloads, documenting decisions, and automating changes, plus when “doing nothing” is the best optimization 🚀 Learn how DoiT empowers businesses to make smarter, timely cloud decisions, guiding you from cost reporting to continuous optimisation

🌍 Remote work isn’t a challenge, it’s an advantage 🧭 Offices create culture by accident. Remote teams need to design it on purpose ✍️ Async communication, sync rituals, clear expectations – how to design the difference 📊 Visibility ≠ productivity. Measure what matters, not who’s online 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Belonging doesn’t happen automatically. Intentional culture makes it real 💸 Office rent vs. a few more great people on your team?

Built on real experiments from founded startups to corporate transformation, Klaus shares what works: practical rituals, team habits, and leadership patterns that help distributed teams focus, connect, and perform, including current work leading product and tech at edding AG.

Enjoy great conversations, great food and the best sushi in town with fellow CTOs at Hensslers Küche.

🎨 Software isn’t manufacturing with specialized disciplines—it is supposed to be an interdisciplinary design process. 🎟️ But tickets create silos, short cycles with big teams lead to micromanagement, and endless Kanban columns drain energy. ✂️ Slicing the work differently—around objectives, problems, solutions, and delivery—changes everything. 🔄 Design and scale interdisciplinary small teams, ownership, and habit-enforcing reporting structures. ❤️ Emancipate teams by giving real people real ownership and setting the stage for success.

Klaus, leading Product & Technology at edding, shares insights from leading interdisciplinary teams—from his startups to exit and corporate transformation. Today, the methods, tools, and principles all exist, but change often feels too drastic and transformation stalls. This talk breaks concepts down into first principles and comes with practical, easy-to-try experiments.

Want to break some silos?

Hello fellow alphalisters, during the past years I talked to some of you about my burnout. Since I'm currently working on a Talk about the topic and how it can Impact companies and individuals. I wanted pitch it to all of you first to get some feedback, answer questions and discuss your thoughts about your experiences.

This masterclass unveils the power of Gemini for Workspace, showcasing its transformative impact on your daily work habits. showcasing how to gain valuable insights, save time and do more.

David will be fielding our questions on 37Signal's move to on-prem

Exchange ideas with other CTOs in an intimate setting

High expectations, limited headcount— developer productivity has taken on new urgency in the post-ZIRP era. Join us to discuss what that means, and some perhaps-surprising ways to improve productivity in your own organization.

Enjoy great conversations, great food and the best sushi in town with fellow CTOs at Hensslers Küche.

Beyond Mimicking: How Reasoning, Agents, and Specialized Models are Shaping GenAI Less Talk. More action This masterclass guides you through the latest breakthroughs in AI reasoning, smart agents, and specialized foundation models. Discover how AI is rapidly evolving to handle complex real-world challenges. Join us on this exciting journey!

Talk tech and have fun at our annual alphalist CTOktoberfest. We kick off at the Slack office with some programming before walking together to the Schützenfestzelt.

Become a better CTO at the annual CTO Summit. Learn from top tech leaders at the micro-conference before sitting down to connect at dinner with fellow CTOs. We start at 2 pm with lightning content, followed by A+ dinner and drinks at 7. With code.talks speakers there, it is guaranteed to be the best knowledge exchange you have have ever experienced.

Join other developers and CTOs at the leading tech event which is a fixture in the DACH tech scene. Network, learn, and have fun at this tech event.

Find out how to nurture talent with Mobile.de's structured yet playful approach to developing talent

Learn how to make the best trade-offs between different stack choices for LLM devtools so that you could ship fast, but not rewrite everything when the next model drops. Give your engineers the tools to made well-educated decisions and keep up to date with new 

How do you “Shape Up” your product teams for the challenges of rapid company growth? In this session, we’ll discuss how Storyblok overcame growing pains such as misaligned product teams, capacity bottlenecks, and overburdened leaders involved in every single decision.

While the promise of GenAI is widely discussed, what about the pitfalls? Find out how to succeed at every stage of your GenAI journey, from ideation to production, with expert guidance to minimize friction and avoid setbacks.No matter your current stage of GenAI adoption, this Masterclass (given by  AI/ML and data engineering experts from DoiT) will equip you with 5 must-have lessons to examine your roadmap and avoid the biggest pitfalls

Get autonomy right with this masterclass with  Eric Bowman. You will learn how to cultivate earned autonomy and empower your team to make independent decisions that align with organizational goals. 

How are you using custom AI tools to make your company more productive? How are you handling the compliance aspects? How did you find the best model? How are you watching the costs? How do you measure ROI in terms of finetuning and getting accurate responses? Let’s discuss it in our next AI Roundtable. We will start off with a presentation on creating a Slackbot. presented by   @Markus Schneider before opening the floor to a AI Roundtable moderated by @Ingmar Krusch

How we worked on eComm and CMS

Should AI be regulated?

How we do our SaaS provision for visibility and savings

How we do Compensation at Metro Markets

How do the best engineering organizations deliver quickly, at high quality, and in line with business objectives? In this talk, we’ll review learnings from developer productivity research, and talk about the key ingredients your organization will need — and questions you’ll need to answer — in order to kick off a successful improvement effort. We’ll also talk about how to get started even if you don’t yet have all the pieces in place. Hear from Rebecca Murphey, field CTO at Swarmia and former developer productivity leader at Stripe and Indeed, about lessons you should apply at your organization.

What is the EU AI Act? How are other CTOs handling it?

This mini-workshop uncovers and highlights the kinds of practices, processes, and decision-making needed for organizations to thrive in a fast-flowing world based on Team Topologies. Join the co-author of Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton, to co-create and co-discover some key operating principles for fast flow.

Explore prioritization strategies, team empowerment, business risks & opportunities when managing technical debt in this alphalist Masterclass by Cornel Fatulescu, Chief Platform Officer at Pentalog. Tech strategist & CTO mentor with over 23 years of experience, Cornel is here to share lessons learned. 

Learn how to slash your cloud bill (AWS/GCP) without sacrificing performance from FREENOW CTO Jan Ramm and DoiT Cloud Architecture Lead Chris Prahl. Find out how reduce up to 40% of your cost with identifying cost-saving opportunities. Jan will share how he was able identify cost-saving opportunities by getting clarity on their cloud cost drivers - down to the cost-per-service and cost-per-team.

Find out how Lars Rieche uses AI/ML to 30x developer productivity

Exchange ideas with other CTOs in an intimate setting

Talk tech and have fun at our annual alphalist CTOktoberfest.

Find out how to scale your team efficiently in this post-COVID remote world. In this Masterclass, Lars Janowfsky will discuss Challenges, Solutions, and Best Practices. He draws from over 30 years of experience in scaling teams from 5 devs up to 300 devs.

Find out how Shape Up would work for Scale Ups in this Masterclass with Ryan Singer. When it comes to product development, many leaders know that agile rituals and handoffs from designers to builders aren't working. Ryan will talk about how to use practices from Shape Up to fix quality issues and ship projects that stay closer to the original intent.

Find out how Shape Up would work for Scale Ups in this Masterclass with Ryan Singer. When it comes to product development, many leaders know that agile rituals and handoffs from designers to builders aren't working. Ryan will talk about how to use practices from Shape Up to fix quality issues and ship projects that stay closer to the original intent.

Find out how to build remote teams through relationships, communication, and psychological safety in this alphalist Masterclass **by **Tobias Günther - co-founder and former CEO of GitTower. Tobias has been leading remote teams since 2010 and is here to share how to do it.

Lets share how tech teams can become more productive through the use of AI/ML as a DevTool. Lars Rieche will kick off the roundtable by sharing how he uses AI/ML to 30x developer productivity. Then we open the table for discussion.

Talk tech and have fun

 A remote round table meeting for sharing use cases and best practices when automating different processes with ML (does not need to be LLMs)

Join us for a one-stop CTO Summit crafted with your hectic schedule in mind. Doors open at 16:30 and at 17h00 we start with a micro-conference followed by the gourmet dinner and drinks. Come and enjoy the networking and knowledge exchange that alphalist is famous for. Plus, get a free ticket to OMR 2023 (feat. Serena Williams) for more inspiration!

A masterclass on no-code

Let's get together in Berlin and discuss in-depth OpenAI and LLMs? Dennis Zelada  will be telling us more about Wishpond’s AI Website Builder project Markus Dücker will give a general overview of the models and tools landscape + can talk about their ChatGPT prototype at Handshake. Call for Participation: Got an interesting AI use case, prototype, etc. to present? DM Markus Dücker on Slack

Talk tech and have fun at our annual alphalist CTOktoberfest. We will kick off the event with pre-drinks at Google Kontorhaus Munich (Erika-Mann-Straße 33) where there will be a short presentation on technical leadership by Wieland Holfelder, VP, Engineering at Google Cloud. Then we will ''Walk and Talk' over to the Paulaner Festzelt where the festival will continue. 

Become a better CTO at the annual CTO Summit. Learn from top tech leaders at the micro-conference before sitting down to connect at dinner with fellow CTOs. Plus, you also get access to the other happenings at the OMR 2022 festival where you can hear speakers such as Ashton Kutcher, Scott Galloway, Quentin Tarantino and others.

Entrance is from 4 to 5pm. At 5 we start with keynotes, have a A+ dinner and drinks and best knowledge exchange we had in a lifetime ;-)

Intimate Dinner at Axel Springer