What I'm taking home from Come To Code 2026
This post was translated from Italian with the help of Claude.
Once again this year I spent most of my time in the human skills track. It was a deliberate choice: to learn something, you have to get a little uncomfortable. If we always stay in our comfort zone we never find our limits, and nobody will push us past a limit we don’t know we have.
Paolo Caressa told the story of ELIZA, the first chatbot in history, and how he wrote a BASIC to JavaScript compiler to run the original code in a modern browser. Fascinating, instructive and absolutely mind blowing.
Valerio Barbera presented NeuronAI, his PHP framework for building agents and agentic applications. My love for PHP was satisfied in a single talk. I’ve followed the project since its launch, but so far I had never managed to get my hands on it for real: at work I was heading in another direction, and in my personal projects I didn’t have a real use case. Seeing it presented live gave me a few ideas though… we’ll see.
Michele Ferracin, with “The one skill AI can’t steal from you: your voice”, mixed real experiences, coaching advice and plenty of irony. The core message stuck with me: our craft is moving away from pure code writing toward something different, and communicating effectively becomes essential. It means choosing the right register depending on who’s in front of us, but above all being honest. Even in the most basic way: knowing how to say “I don’t know” instead of bluffing. A bluff can work in the short term, but sooner or later the bill comes due.
Valentina Milone told us to write about the events we attend, right away, while they’re fresh, and with style, because form enhances content. I’m a terrible student: I always do it late and badly. But advice like this eventually settles enough to become foundation (this post is proof of that, more or less).
Giulio Sciarappa drew a parallel between his job as an Enterprise IT Architect facing a disaster in production and his volunteer work on an ambulance. In both cases the best answer to an emergency is preparation: internalized procedures, clear policies, defined and shared responsibilities. Only then does an emergency become manageable.
Eleonora Biancone made us play. A serious game: a simulation of the workflow in a burger and fries restaurant. Over three rounds, teams of six went from near total chaos to a reworked, optimized and much more efficient process. I was on quality control, and I know someone still hates me because I kept sending the fries back 🤣
Davide Passafaro showed me something I didn’t know was possible: running an AI model directly in the browser. Small, sure, but capable of interesting things. He says he used it in the worst possible way, for a game instead of a chatbot. I think using the wrong tool is the best way to understand its limits. And anyway, the game worked.
I would gladly have stayed on after Sunday lunch, but a four hour drive back to Rome was waiting for me. Next time I’m taking an extra day: Pignola is a lovely place and the surrounding area deserves to be explored at a slow pace.
Thanks to all the Come To Code staff, see you next year.