Sam Snyder
VP of Engineering @ Moderne
Sam Snyder has spent the past decade working on improving developer happiness with better tooling. At Tableau software, he used data from the development and deployment pipeline to systematically seize the greatest opportunities for improvement and eliminate the greatest pain points. At Gradle, he integrated that process and data visualization methodology into Gradle Enterprise. Now as VP of Engineering at Moderne, Sam leads development on the core refactoring technologies and teaches Moderne's customers how to automate away the tedious, repetitive parts of software development.
Presentations
Generative AI can be a powerful force multiplier for developers, but it also comes with limitations. Developers are expected to co-create with AI, and check the generated output, or risk hallucinations running wild. This can aid development at a local machine, but what happens when you try to apply these tools on a massive scale?
For mass-scale code operations, AI needs to have agency, able to operate with some degree of autonomy. In this session, we’ll cover how you can combine retrieval and tool calling techniques, the richest code data source for Java called the Lossless Semantic Tree (LST), and OpenRewrite rules-based recipes to drive more efficient and accurate AI model output for refactoring and analyzing large codebases.
You’ll learn about how you can use AI embeddings as a powerful tool to visualize, analyze, and even do smarter sampling for your codebase. Plus, we’ll show you how to leverage GenAI to accelerate writing OpenRewrite deterministic recipes.
We’ll take an honest look back and a look ahead on our process, to show you how enterprises can now reliably leverage AI for code modernization at scale.
We’ll discuss and demonstrate how to write custom recipes using OpenRewrite, an open source auto-refactoring tool, to study and analyze your code before planning migration and modernization efforts—and then automate code changes for your teams.
Join us to deepen your understanding of migration engineering with OpenRewrite and gain actionable strategies to streamline modernization and bring your codebase into the future with confidence.
Software keeps moving—and so must we. From end-of-life frameworks to sprawling polyglot stacks and never-ending CVEs, modernizing code at scale is one of the toughest, most necessary problems in engineering today. In this keynote, we’ll take a clear-eyed look at where we are—and what it really takes to move forward.
We’ll unpack the rise of agentic AI, and why the future isn’t just about bigger models but better data and tools. Generative AI may be great at writing new code, but modernizing existing code? That takes precision—and deterministic systems that know when not to guess.
We’ll also dig into the language engineering problem: how do you unify modernization with codebases written in Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, and more? Each language needs a custom model that captures types, formatting, and structure for meaningful, accurate change at scale.
Finally, we’ll confront the security tradeoffs facing modern teams: should you upgrade fast to stay on the latest most secure versions, or leverage back patches to stay secure on what you know? The answer isn't always forward motion—it’s smarter, safer modernization.
We're helping teams navigate all of this with confidence at Moderne, providing AI-driven, multi-language refactoring and modernization at scale. After all, modern software demands more than speed—it demands the ability to evolve, safely and continuously, no matter how complex the codebase or how fast the industry moves.
Join us as we kick off Code Remix Summit—your front-row seat to the future of code.