🎙️ We’re thrilled to welcome Valarie Regas to Stir Trek 2026!
Valarie Regas at Stir Trek 2026
DevOps, Advocacy, and Human Interest
About Valarie Regas
Valarie Regas is a DevOps fanatic, a Georgia Tech coding bootcamp graduate, and a veteran mommy. She holds a BA in Psychology and currently works in Computer Science education. After years being a stay-at-home mom, she decided to change her life by entering tech, and has learned a lot along the way. Outside of work, she enjoys mixed martial arts fighting, table-top role playing games, public speaking, creating tiny humans, and activism of all sorts.
Session: Productivity Theater: When ‘Just Use AI’ Becomes a Management Strategy
1 May 2026 10:30 AM | Back to the Future - Theatre 3 (1,2)
Track: Professional Growth & Leadership
We’re living through a strange era of work: leaders are told AI enables “10×” or “100×” productivity, while engineers are quietly fixing AI-introduced bugs, validating hallucinated outputs, and absorbing the mental load of tools that are powerful, but deeply imperfect.
This talk is about surviving that reality.
We’ll examine what actually happens when AI enters real developer workflows: where trust is partial, verification is mandatory, and speed often comes at the cost of focus and creativity. We’ll talk candidly about productivity theater, unrealistic expectations, and the quiet burnout that happens when “just use AI” becomes a substitute for good leadership and sustainable engineering practices.
Drawing from real conversations with engineers and teams, this session offers practical ways to:
• Push back (constructively) against impossible productivity narratives
• Use AI without surrendering judgment, craft, or accountability
• Protect mental energy in environments obsessed with output metrics
• Re-anchor DevOps values around humans, not hype cycles
This isn’t a talk about how to get more done. It’s a talk about how to keep doing good work, and maintain health and stability, in a world that thinks software engineers should be machines.
Connect with Valarie
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valarieregas/
- Twitter/X: @ValarieRegas
- Website: https://valarieregas.com
- Blog: https://medium.com/@valarieregas
Join Us at Stir Trek 2026
Stir Trek 2026 takes place on May 1st, 2026 in Columbus, OH. Don’t miss Valarie’s session — grab your ticket before they’re gone!
🎟️ Register now: https://events.humanitix.com/stir-trek-2026-edition