LLNL's annual Developer Day, or Dev Day, returned on July 1, 2026, for its 10th year, bringing together software developers from across the Lab to share ideas, showcase technical progress, and strengthen community.
Held in a hybrid format, the event continued a tradition of developer-focused exchange while reflecting the current ways LLNL teams collaborate across in-person and remote settings. The full-day agenda featured lightning talks, networking opportunities, an author session, games and prizes, a developer survey recap, and a student panel.
Developer Day is grounded in the goals of LLNL’s Software Sustainability strategy: improving software productivity and sustainability, growing software teams and communities, amplifying good software practices, and increasing visibility into the impact of LLNL’s software efforts.
“It's great to see software developers from across the Lab come together to meet and learn from each other,” said Dev Day organizer Eric Vardar-Irrgang. “Even by lunch time there was plenty to talk about, and I'd met new staff. At times, I and others in the audience were surprised to learn about work happening at LLNL, including major projects and entire parts of the organization we didn’t know about. To me, that’s one of the reasons Developer Day exists."
The morning session opened with presentations spanning a range of projects, including the Software Improvement Networking Group; the HPC Tutorial Series; the INQ electronic structure code; real-time experiment steering in 3D biological microscopy; Tesseract for automated cyber range and data generation; MyBitBucket API; and Hubcast, a secure GitHub mirroring solution for HPC environments.
Dev Day attendees and others from around the Lab were then treated to a lively talk by author (The Cuckoo’s Egg) and cybersecurity icon Clifford Stoll. Stoll recounted his experience in the mid-1980s at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab where he helped uncover a KGB hacker who had infiltrated an LBNL computer system.
Stoll's talk was followed by lunch and a mid-day game of Family Feud, hosted by the Lab's employee services team and featuring questions drawn from the recent Lab-wide Developer Survey. A deeper dive into the survey results followed, with presenter Tyler Jackson sharing several interesting trends from the responses.
The afternoon session focused on the developer experience and emerging AI tools, with talks on “laser beam” coding with LLNL Claude, pair programming with Claude, AI developer tools at LLNL, building a project’s first AI agent, and sustainable application mapping for HPC systems.
The day concluded with a student panel, bringing back a popular program that gives attendees a chance to hear directly from Lab interns and graduate students about their projects and experiences.
Since its inception, Developer Day has emphasized the importance of software to LLNL’s mission and celebrated the value of bringing developers together to exchange insights. Those themes remained central in the 10th anniversary event, which showcased technical breadth and the collaborative culture that has made the gathering a fixture of the Lab’s computing community.
Past coverage of Dev Day events can be found on this website.
—Deanna Willis