Fintech Devcon 2025

It wasn't only my first time presenting at a conference, but my first ever conference.

Fintech Devcon is a three-day conference targeted at builders in the Fintech industry - hosted by Moov, it is the 'only event created by developers, for developers'.

The Conference

Located in the Sheraton Downtown Hotel in Denver, the conference was of considerable size. Spread across six different rooms, there were four smaller classroom-esque rooms, one significantly larger room known as windows, and finally the grand ballroom for keynotes.

Unfortunately we weren't a keynote this year (fingers crossed for 2026), but we were assigned to the larger windows room, which was exciting.

Our Talk

Kirill (an old manager/mentor) and I were representing J.P. Morgan, slotted for a 45-minute 'roadblock' talk on web application performance which detailed our journey from 0 to 1000 transactions per second (TPS).

While 1000 TPS might not sound groundbreaking, the journey to reach that milestone was anything but trivial. Along the way, we developed some lesser-known HTTP connection management techniques and ended up contributing patches back to the open-source projects that power our stack—namely Cassandra and Reactor Netty (among others).

How It Went

Two minutes prior to our talk the room was near empty - worried our talk somehow hadn't sparked the interest we expected, my heart sunk a little. It was only as the clock struck the top of the hour, and we were set to begin, that the room began to fill. A couple of minutes later, the windows room was busy... phew!

45 minutes flew by and the audience appeared captivated. Laptop usage (which is typical at a tech conference) was minimal, and eyes were aimed forward towards the raised stage and screen. Kirill, a seasoned speaker, delivered solidly from the outset, while it took me a few slides to settle in.

At the end, after overrunning a little and skipping a few slides (my fault), we had a few well-thought questions, and a couple also hung around after to chat.

Overall

Attending and speaking at FinTech Devcon was a privilege. I don't think I have ever been in a space with such a high density of smart and passionate people, let alone people interested in building, and being able to share our story was the icing on the cake.

It was clear Moov really went all out for this event. Highlights included:

• Speakers dinner on the first evening with a notably fancy wine selection (thanks, Wade)
• Quality speaker swag (hoodie, backpack & more)
• Impressive keynotes (Wise CTO, PayPal SVP)

I later found out they made a $200k loss on the conference, which honestly wasn't that surprising. Not many companies would take that kind of hit just to create something genuinely valuable for builders.

One thing that particularly stood out was seeing idempotency—a topic I've written about before—get the attention it deserves. I counted five talks that touched on its importance, with one entirely dedicated to it.