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. 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. An LLM pipeline, a RAG system, and a running experiment: how much of my own work can LLM agents 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.

Latest post 18. August 2026 ยท The Algorithm Decided Case #1: The more senior the developer, the worse her incident stats Most of us have a very simplified mental model of statistics. We understand statistical statements like โ€œthe average of <something> is <this much>โ€ as 100% true. They are math after...

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 ๐Ÿ‡ท๐Ÿ‡ธ Software Estimates and the Illusion of Control
  • Oct 2026 TDC 2026 ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ด Did My Deploy Degrade Production? Detecting Bad Deploys with Math
  • Oct 2026 Devoxx Belgium 2026 ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ช Their API Went Down. So Why Is My App on Fire?
  • Jun 2026 Voxxed Days Luxembourg 2026 ๐Ÿ‡ฑ๐Ÿ‡บ Did My Deploy Degrade Production?
  • May 2026 PyCon Italia 2026 ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡น Stop asking me how long it will take

All talks and the talk catalogue

Selected writing

Archive of all posts