Milan Milanović
CTO / Trucking Hub
Milan has spent 20+ years building software and leading engineering teams. He works mostly with Azure and the Microsoft .NET stack on cloud, web, and mobile systems. He also writes about software engineering for a community of 400K+ engineers across his newsletter and LinkedIn.
Expect the Unexpected: How Software Laws Shape People, Teams, and Systems
Every senior engineer has had the moment. The outage at 2am that came out of nowhere. The team that quietly fell apart. The architecture that got worse the more you fixed it.
None of it came out of nowhere. It came out of laws nobody named in time.
This talk gives you nine of them, across three levels, in 35 minutes. Cognitive biases that mislead the individual. Coordination laws that break the team. Architectural patterns that bend systems under their own weight. Dunning-Kruger, Conway, Hyrum, Gall, and the rest. Named decades ago. Still operating in 2026.
The interesting part is what AI does to all of this. The laws do not break under AI. They amplify. Your org chart ships faster. Your bad assumptions compile cleaner. Your sunk costs grow on autocomplete.
You leave with a three-question diagnostic to run before any architecture decision, post-mortem, or design review. Same shape as the book underneath. More depth in the chapters.