Ines Panker

Hi, I'm Ines Panker.

I'm a senior staff engineer at Sleuth, a SaaS observability platform (the first engineer they hired, de-facto architect), and a conference speaker on the human side of engineering, from Slovenia.

I take complicated systems and find the arrangement that makes them work like poetry.

Almost two decades of building software.

Multi-tenant architecture. Circuit breakers guarding over a million API calls a day. Real-time anomaly detection for hundreds of clients. An LLM pipeline, a RAG system, and a running experiment: how much of my own work can LLM agents carry.

Python Go Django Celery PostgreSQL Redis RabbitMQ Elasticsearch LLM agents Conference speaking

How to contact me: LinkedIn works best, or catch me at one of the conferences below.

More about me My CV My talks

Latest post 3. November 2026 · The Algorithm Decided Case #4: Our algorithm suggests deploying only on FridayIn the previous post we looked at how easily crucial data points slip out of our sample. But we only scratched the surface. Recently updated 25. October 2026 Software estimation is a delusion You will never be able to accurately estimate the time and effort it will take you to build a piece...

What I do

Build software

Almost two decades of writing code: Java first, then PHP, then a decade of Python. Backends, data models, the architecture around them.

Untangle systems

I take codebases that have outgrown their teams and make them understandable again. Like reverse-engineering the undocumented data layer of a compliance platform and rebuilding its model layer.

Speak & teach

Lots of conference talks across Europe, all on my own time: software estimation, detecting bad deploys with math, API resilience, cognitive biases in code.

Speaking

I speak in my free time: no sponsors, no employer agenda, just topics I care about.

  • Apr 2027 QCon London 2027 Did My Deploy Degrade Production? Answering It for Other People's Systems
  • Dec 2026 BuildStuff 2026 Did My Deploy Degrade Production? Detecting Bad Deploys with Math, Not AI
  • Nov 2026 Heapcon 2026 Software Estimates and the Illusion of Control
  • Oct 2026 Devoxx Belgium 2026 Their API Went Down. So Why Is My App on Fire?
  • Sep 2026 Python Meetup Ljubljana Their API Went Down, So Why is My App on Fire?

All talks and the talk catalogue

Selected writing

Archive of all posts