Speaking

Talks

Talks on the parts of front-end at scale that rarely get a stage: the design system every team depends on, the migrations nobody wants to run, and the biases that shape the decisions in between.

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Current talks

When the AI writes the UI: keeping a company on-brand at the speed of code generation

AI assistants now write a large share of front-end code. Left alone they converge on the same generic interface, ignore the tokens and reinvent components that already ship. A field report from the ZEISS design system: turning the system from a library teams import into context that AI tools obey, and measuring compliance in the output instead of trusting the prompt.

  • A design system is now an input to code generation, not only a dependency
  • Compliance is measured in the output, not assumed from the prompt
  • AI amplifies whatever teams already do with the system

Codemods are how a company changes its mind

In a large organisation a breaking change in a central library waits for every team’s roadmap, and the old version lives on for years. At ZEISS the migration now ships with the release: monorepos to see every consumer, transforms that survive real code, and adoption that is measured rather than announced.

  • Ship the migration, not the changelog
  • Codemods pay off once they run against every consumer
  • A version is retired when nobody imports it, not when it is released

Thirty-three ways your brain lies to you about architecture

A TUM master’s thesis catalogued 33 cognitive biases that distort how software architects observe, orient, decide and act, published at ICSA 2018. One enterprise design system later, the same biases show up in design reviews and framework choices. The five that cost teams the most, how to recognise each in a meeting, and one countermeasure per bias.

  • Bias is noise in judgement; the OODA loop shows where it enters
  • The most expensive biases are social, not technical
  • Countermeasures are process changes, not willpower

Past talks

  1. Introducing a Digital Service Catalog for speed and scale

    2023

    Conference talk · WeAreDevelopers World Congress, Berlin · with Bastian Heilemann

    How a digital service catalog removes tech-stack fragmentation in an enterprise without stifling developer innovation. Recorded; video linked.

  2. Lightning talk on TypeScript in production

    2019

    Meetup talk · Munich TypeScript Meetup

  3. Design systems, monorepos and AI-assisted front-end engineering

    2022 – present

    Internal talks · ZEISS internal engineering events

Speaker bio

Akash Manjunath is a Lead Software Engineer at Carl ZEISS AG and a Staff member of the ZEISS Expert Ladder for front-end technologies. He leads the engineering of Beyond, the ZEISS design system, across React, Angular and Tailwind. He introduced monorepos and codemod-based migrations at ZEISS and now works on AI that generates design-system and brand-compliant front-end code. His TUM master’s research on cognitive biases in software-architecture decisions was published at ICSA 2018. He lives in Munich.

This text can be used as is. A longer bio and a headshot are available on request.