This opinion piece from The Register argues that streamed tech conferences are usually too uneven to watch in full, but praises Software Should Work 2026, held in July, as a rare exception that rewards binge-watching from start to finish. The conference focuses on software reliability in its broadest sense, covering not just working code but abstraction, formal methods, complexity management, tooling, team culture and individual craft, making it feel like a genuine symposium rather than a marketing showcase.

The event comprised 13 talks, watchable in a day, featuring speakers with deep hands-on experience who chose their own subjects rather than following a fixed theme. Highlights include Richard Feldman's comparison of web stacks and dependency growth across 1996, 2006 and 2026 (spanning languages such as TypeScript, Python, Rust and Go), and SQLite creator Richard Hipp's personal account of how his codebase evolved alongside changing test methods. Other talks touch on formal analysis, the "superhero engineer" myth, AI-related pitfalls, and debates over tools like Nix, with the author framing reliability as a culture-wide challenge rather than a purely technical one.