Modern Software Development for the Physical World
An evening dedicated to modern software development for the physical world, exploring Rust, C++, safety-critical software, and physical AI across automotive, embedded systems, and beyond.
Join us for talks by speakers from JetBrains, BMW, and Ferrous Systems, with food, drinks, and plenty of time for networking and conversations.
Places are limited. Please register to reserve your spot.
Agenda
18:00 · Doors open, food, drinks, and networking
18:30 · Talks
20:15 · Networking, food, and drinks until 22:00
Speakers and topics
Vitaly Bragilevsky, JetBrains: Scaling agentic software development for physical AI
Xavier Bonaventura, BMW: Achieving functional safety with C++
Florian Gilcher, Ferrous Systems: Rust in Physical AI
More about the talks and speakers
Scaling agentic software development for physical AI
Vitaly Bragilevsky · Head of Rust Ecosystem, JetBrains
How can large software teams adopt agentic development while keeping control of their code and costs? This talk explores the practices and tools that make adoption sustainable: human verification, code understanding, deterministic tools, IDEs, and AI governance. It examines why these foundations matter especially for physical AI, where software decisions have consequences in the physical world.
About Vitaly
Vitaly is the Head of Rust Ecosystem at JetBrains. He taught programming languages at universities for more than 20 years. He is the author of Haskell in Depth and focuses on many programming languages, promoting functional programming principles.
Achieving functional safety with C++
Xavier Bonaventura · Software Engineer, BMW
In the last few years, there have been many discussions about C++ not being a safe language. But safety has many meanings. In safety-critical systems, what we care about most is functional safety. In this talk, you will see how functional safety can be achieved with C++.
We will use as an example a high-performance, safety-critical communication middleware that we have made available as open source.
About Xavier
Xavier Bonaventura is a Software Engineer at BMW, where he works on the software stack for the next generation of autonomous driving. He is also part of the MISRA C++ working group and a member of the ISO C++ committee representing the BMW Group.
Xavier believes that success in large-scale projects can only be achieved through high-quality standards, using modern technologies, and applying software engineering principles at all levels.
He has worked in various fields, such as computer graphics, information theory, and data aggregation, and with codebases of different sizes, with contributions from 5 to 2,000 software developers.
Xavier loves learning and teaching. When he is not programming, he likes cooking, hiking, biking, and jogging.
Rust in Physical AI
Florian Gilcher · Managing Director, Ferrous Systems
Rust is widely used in many environments, but most of what we talk about is in cloud or desktop environments. Rust is popular in physical spaces as well! In this talk, I'll discuss multiple physical AI projects across multiple industry sectors. Some of them are safety-certified, and some are not.
We'll also discuss the reasons why Rust is chosen and the current state of the industry.
About Florian
Florian Gilcher is Managing Director of Ferrous Systems. He has been part of the Rust project since 2015 in various positions, including on the community and core teams. He is a co-founder of the Rust Foundation.
He has been teaching Rust for 10 years and has a wide breadth of knowledge of the language. Recently, he has been busy bringing Rust to safety-critical industries, such as automotive, avionics, and industrial applications.
Interested in collaborating, giving a lightning talk, or sharing an idea for a future event? Get in touch at liran.aloni@jetbrains.com.