Two decades of technical events, one airfield in Ireland, and a helicopter rescue that explains more about event design than any conference playbook.

Trishan de Lanerolle is a strategic programs manager at F5, a cybersecurity and network security company, where he focuses on AI initiatives. He spent the earlier part of his career organizing and producing developer-focused open source events at the Linux Foundation and Trinity College. In this conversation, he walks through the events that shaped how he thinks about participant experience, content longevity, hybrid access, and the emerging reality of AI agents as a new category of event "attendee."

What You'll Learn

• Venue as experience: The physical setting of an event (a vineyard in Bordeaux, a closed Irish airfield) shapes community memory in ways a conference center cannot replicate.
• The CFP as community discovery: Publishing a call for proposals surfaces contributors and voices that organizers didn't know existed, before a single session is on the schedule.
• Agent-first browsing: AI agents are now hitting websites and event content in milliseconds, and optimizing for that behavior is the next generation of what SEO used to be for Google spiders.
• Recorded content is systematically underused: Most event recordings get posted to YouTube and left to accumulate dust rather than being repurposed into community content, clips, or follow-on engagement.
• In-person irreplaceability: The hallway conversation, the post-event dinner, and the spontaneous collaboration are the parts of events that virtual participation still cannot reproduce.
• Virtual participation is an access mechanism: Streaming and recording don't replace in-person attendance. They extend events to people who would otherwise be excluded entirely.
• Live demos carry disproportionate risk and reward: An unplanned live release pushed to production on stage at a DPDK conference in San Jose landed. The audience had no idea it wasn't scripted.
• AI is restructuring event content production: Transcript-to-summary pipelines, automated chapter markers, and AI-assisted video editing are already reducing the labor cost of post-event content.

Time-Stamped Highlights

• (00:00) Introduction and Guest Background
• (00:31) From Humanitarian Open Source to Technical Events
• (03:16) Chattanooga and the Train Car Hotel
• (04:32) Favorite Event: DPDK in Bordeaux's Wine Country
• (05:27) The Drone Code Airfield Event in Ireland
• (07:09) Helicopter Rescue and Mud-Caked Engineers
• (08:38) The MCP Summit in New York City
• (09:30) Agent-First Web Browsing and What It Means for Event Content
• (11:02) In-Person vs. Virtual: What Actually Gets Lost on Screen
• (12:08) The Recorded Content Problem Nobody Solves
• (13:52) CFPs as Pre-Event Community Building
• (18:54) Live Demo Risks: Pushing a Release on Stage in San Jose
• (24:43) AI Tools in Video Production and Content Workflows
• (25:03) Vibe Coding, AI Agents, and Where Things Are Headed

Guest bio
Trishan de Lanerolle is a strategic programs manager at F5, a cybersecurity and network load balancing company, where he focuses on AI initiatives and agentic systems. He previously worked at the Linux Foundation producing developer events, conferences, and workshops for open source projects including DPDK and Drone Code, and began his career at Trinity College building humanitarian open source software programs. Connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/trishan and on X at x.com/trishandelan.

About the Podcast
Eventapalooza is a podcast about events, experiences, and the people who produce them, covering what makes gatherings work, fail, and leave a lasting impression on the communities they serve.

Host bio
Tim Arthur is the host of Eventapalooza and founder of E3 Webcasting, a professional live event production and streaming company. With more than 20 years of experience producing video across the globe, he brings a background in marketing, technology, production, and event coordination to every conversation.