Rockstars Valley 2026: Engineering Under Pressure

Join Oscar van der Leij and Aidan Langelaan for a breakout titled "From Strategy to Network Automation - how VodafoneZiggo makes a complex network transformation scalable" at Rockstars Valley 2026.

Event Overview

Rockstars Valley 2026, themed "Engineering Under Pressure," brings together more than 600 engineers, clients, and CIOs at the Johan Cruijff ArenA in Amsterdam. The day is built around four themes: AI impact, cloud sovereignty, security, and people first. Four TED-style keynotes anchor the plenary programme, with three rounds of breakout sessions in between and the Rockstars Awards to close.

Oscar and Aidan's Breakout Session

From strategy to network automation
Oscar van der Leij (Solution Architect) & Aidan Langelaan (Product Owner)

How do you translate a strategic ambition into automation that actually works in the network?

VodafoneZiggo faces the challenge of delivering ever higher internet speeds over its existing coax and fibre network. Doing so means rolling out roughly 15,000 Remote PHY Devices (RPDs) over the coming years. With manual provisioning, that is simply not fast, scalable, or reliable enough.

In this talk, Solution Architect Oscar van der Leij and Product Owner Aidan Langelaan take you through their shared journey from strategy to a working network automation platform. Over more than eighteen months, together with IT teams, network specialists, and engineers, they built a solution that configures and provisions an RPD largely automatically after installation.

But automation turned out to be far more than technology. Requirements only became clear once engineers started testing, specialist knowledge was scarce, and dependencies such as network connectivity regularly affected progress. At the same time, existing processes had to be simplified and different domains had to learn to work closely together.

A practical and open story about brownfield integration, orchestration, iterative development, and the lessons learned along the way. Above all, about why successful automation only emerges when technology, processes, and people come together.

Key Themes

Brownfield integration covers building automation on top of a network and a process landscape that already exist and cannot be paused, where the constraints are inherited rather than chosen.

Orchestration at scale covers what it takes for a device to configure and provision itself after installation, and where the seams between domains turn out to be.

Iterative development covers discovering requirements through testing with engineers rather than gathering them up front, and working around scarce specialist knowledge and shifting dependencies.

Technology, process, and people covers the part that decides the outcome: simplifying the processes around the automation and getting separate domains to collaborate closely.

Agenda

09:30 - 10:30
Registration and Welcome

10:30 - 11:45
Keynote Opening with TED Talks
Wietse Hage (AI and its impact on engineering)
Inge Bryan (cybersecurity)

11:45 - 12:30
Breakout Round 1

12:30 - 13:45
Lunch

13:45 - 14:30
Breakout Round 2

14:30 - 14:45
Break

14:45 - 16:00
Breakout Round 3 and TED Talk
Brankele Frank (stress and performing under pressure)

16:00 - 16:30
Closing Ceremony and Rockstars Awards
Edwin van der Sar

16:30 - 17:15
Networking Reception

Venue

The Johan Cruijff ArenA is easily reached by public transport from NS Station Bijlmer ArenA. Travelling by car? Parking is at P1 ArenA, Burgemeester Stramanweg 130, 1101 AX Amsterdam.