he Signal founder stole the show with an opening chat laying out a case for reclaiming the "magic" of software development that's been lost after 20 years. That loss, he argued, was due to stuffing developers into "black box abstraction layers" that strip them of the freedom needed to be innovative.

"Anybody who is managing an engineering organization will have some kind of management philosophy that is in some way downstream of, derivative of, in the zone of, or somehow related to agile," Marlinspike said.