What Replay explorer are you? Take this quiz to find out

You’re going to Replay. Or you’re thinking about it. Or your manager sent you this link with no context and you’re trying to figure out if this is a conference or a cry for help. Either way, welcome.

This year, Replay ‘26 is at Moscone South in San Francisco, May 5–7. The vibe is “staring into the void and hoping your systems hold up,” which, let’s be honest, is just your job.

The point is: every engineer has a different mission. Some of you are modernizing systems older than your entire team’s ages combined. Some of you shipped an AI agent that’s been making unsupervised decisions since Tuesday. Some of you just want one day where nothing silently fails.

This quiz will help you figure out your path. It will not help you fix your systems. But Replay will.

Who are you?#

Let’s find out.

1. When something breaks in production, what’s your first reaction?#

   A. “Okay, but which version of this system is actually running right now?” (You ask this knowing full well nobody knows.)
   B. “Is the agent still running, or did it decide it was done?” (Both are somehow bad.)
   C. “Did it fail loudly, or did it just… stop?” (You already know the answer.)
   D. “This is going to matter later if we don’t fix it properly.”

2. What kind of work actually gets you out of bed?#

   A. Making something ancient work like something modern. It’s sort of like archaeology, but the ruins are in production and the artifacts are env vars from 2019.
   B. Getting an AI workflow to do something nobody thought possible. Then figuring out why it also did three things nobody asked for.
   C. Finding a failure mode before it finds your users.
   D. Drawing the diagram that makes everything click.

3. At a conference, you’re most likely to be found…#

   A. In a migration talk, taking meticulous notes while quietly having flashbacks.
   B. In an AI session, asking a question so specific that the speaker says, “Um… let’s talk after.”
   C. In a reliability talk, nodding like you’re in a church.
   D. In an architecture session, redrawing the speaker’s diagram in your notebook because you think yours is better.

4. Pick the statement that feels eerily accurate:#

   A. “I swear this system is haunted, but it pays the bills.”
   B. “We shipped intelligence before we shipped structure, and now the intelligence has opinions.”
   C. “If I don’t notice it, no one will. This is both my value and my curse.”
   D. “I’m trying to design something future teams won’t resent.”

Your Replay path#

Tally up your letters. If you got a clean sweep, congratulations on being a stereotype. If you got a mix, pick whichever answer made you inhale sharply through your nose. That’s the real you.

Mostly A’s: The Relic Rebuilder#

You’re keeping civilization running and nobody appreciates it enough. Somewhere in your stack is a system that predates your team’s Slack workspace, your company’s current logo, and possibly your employment. You didn’t write the original code, but you’ve rewritten enough of it to develop a complicated emotional attachment, like restoring a car that was actively on fire when you bought it.

You’re not there to tear it all down. You’ve seen what “let’s just rewrite it” does to a roadmap. You’re here to figure out how to migrate and modernize without a three-month feature freeze that everyone knows will actually take nine.

You say “strangler fig pattern” at parties. You do not get invited to many parties.

You Replay sessions: The talks where someone describes migrating a critical system in production and the room goes silent because everyone’s done the math on what could’ve gone wrong. You’ll find your people in the migration and modernization tracks, and you’ll leave with real patterns, not a slide deck full of fluff.

Mostly B’s: The AI Expedition Leader#

You’re building the thing everyone’s excited about and no one fully understands yet. Including, on some days, you. Your demos are incredible. Your production incidents are creative. Last week your agent decided to retry a workflow 400 times and you’re still not entirely sure why, but the logs suggest it was “thinking.”

You’ve learned the hard way that “the model figured it out” is not an acceptable answer in a post-mortem. You’re past the hype. You’re solidly in the “okay, how do we actually run this in prod without it making autonomous decisions about our infra at 2am?” phase.

You say “agentic” in casual conversation now. Your friends have noticed.

You need structure, durability, and observability for systems that are, by design, a little unpredictable. You also need to talk to people who get it, because your non-AI coworkers’ eyes glaze over approximately 90 seconds into any conversation about agent orchestration.

Your Replay sessions: AI and orchestration talks, obviously. But the real track is the hallway conversations. The ones where someone describes an agent failure mode and you go “oh God, that happened to us too” and suddenly you have a support group.

Mostly C’s: The Guardian of Reliability#

You didn’t apply for this job. The job applied for you. At some point you were the person who noticed a silent failure, and now you’re the person who notices all the silent failures, because apparently this is a skill the universe decided to give you instead of something fun, like being good at guitar.

You know that “completed” doesn’t always mean completed. You know the monitoring dashboard has gaps. You know about the gap in the monitoring dashboard’s monitoring. And man, are you tired.

But you’re also kind of addicted to it? The dopamine hit of catching a production issue before it becomes a customer-facing incident is unmatched. You won’t admit this to your therapist, but you’ll admit it to strangers at a conference. Which is why you need Replay.

Your Replay sessions: Observability deep dives. Failure-mode talks. The session where someone puts up a slide about silent failures and you lock eyes with a stranger across the room and just nod. That person is now your best friend. You will message each other about outages for the next three years.

Mostly D’s: The Systems Cartographer#

You think in diagrams. You can’t help it. While your team is solving today’s problem, you’re already three steps ahead, thinking about how today’s solution becomes next year’s constraint. You suggest “maybe we should step back and think about this holistically” and everyone looks at you like you just proposed a six-month research sabbatical.

You care about making decisions that age well. You want future engineers to look at your architecture and think “whoa, someone was actually thinking” instead of “damn, someone was in panic mode.” This is noble and also a little lonely, because the reward for good systems design is that nothing ever breaks and nobody notices.

You’ve been described as “the person who always asks good questions in design reviews,” which is a compliment that means “the person who adds 30 minutes to design reviews.”

Your Replay sessions: Architecture talks and platform engineering talks. Sessions where someone draws on a whiteboard and the whole room leans forward. You’ll leave with new boxes on your diagram that didn’t exist before.

Find your people at Replay#

Whatever your path — rebuilding, pioneering, guarding, or mapping — there are people at Replay navigating the same terrain. The talks will give you patterns and playbooks. The hallways will give you a community that actually gets it.

And the afterparty will give you All Time Low, because even explorers need to hear Dear Maria, Count Me In at max volume. We don’t make the rules.

Replay ‘26. May 5–7. Moscone South, San Francisco. Use code ZIGGY75 for 75% off.

Register for Replay.

We’ll see you at the spaceport.