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. The last decade in Python.
Multi-tenant architecture. Circuit breakers guarding over a million API calls a day. Real-time anomaly detection for hundreds of clients. Lately: an LLM pipeline, a RAG system, and testing how much of my own work LLM agents can carry.
Python Django Celery PostgreSQL Redis Elasticsearch LLM agents Conference speaking
How to contact me: LinkedIn works best, or catch me at one of the conferences below.
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.
- Nov 2026 Heapcon 2026 🇷🇸 Software Estimates and the Illusion of Control
- Oct 2026 TDC 2026 🇳🇴 Did My Deploy Degrade Production? Detecting Bad Deploys with Math
- Oct 2026 Devoxx Belgium 2026 🇧🇪 Their API Went Down. So Why Is My App on Fire?
- Jun 2026 Voxxed Days Luxembourg 2026 🇱🇺 Did My Deploy Degrade Production?
- May 2026 PyCon Italia 2026 🇮🇹 Stop asking me how long it will take