Every want to build something but was told you shouldn't by "The Internet"? Me Too. Here's the story of how I chose to ignore those people and finally do the thing I've wanted to do since I was a kid, make a video game!

Dealing with secret keys on its own can be a source of frustration. Add to that the complexity of hybrid rendering, multiple deployment environments, and AI coding agents and it becomes even more of a challenge. Phil will show you how to use varlock.dev to turn your .env files into a source of confidence and demonstrate how it can prevent secret leaks in your Next.js apps and beyond.

Agentic React apps where UIs autonomously act, chain tool calls, and evolve state—bring complexity that traditional observability tools can't unravel. How do you actually understand what your agents are doing in production?

In this talk, we'll explore agent observability: capturing not just logs, metrics, and traces, but the reasoning, tool usage, and decision paths behind agent behavior. You'll learn how to bring visibility into agent workflows, how OpenTelemetry semantic conventions help standardize telemetry, and how modern tools let your agents "talk back," so you can debug, understand, and trust what they're doing.

By the end, you will take away a practical workflow to instrument, trace, and interrogate agents—so your apps aren't operating in the dark.