Mohammed Aboullaite
Full-time DJ — spinning Docker & Java — and part-time blogger. Engineering at Spotify and community catalyst. Open source contributor, Java Champion, Docker Captain, Google Developer Expert.
Made in Morocco 🇲🇦, lost in Sweden 🇸🇪. Most of the internet knows me as laytoun, way easier to pronounce than my last name! I'm a senior software engineer at Spotify in Stockholm, and I've spent the last decade around the JVM, containers, and distributed systems, mostly learning from what breaks. My blog's tagline puts it best: failure sucks, but instructs.
These days I'm focused on making Spotify ubiquitous and agentic: music and podcasts wherever an AI assistant, an agent, or whatever surface comes next can reach them. The rest of my time goes into agentic programming and everything around it. Along the way I've contributed to a bunch of open source projects, mostly around the JVM and containers.
I write about the things I break in production at Laytoun' thoughts: Java, Kubernetes, Docker, and lately a lot of AI engineering. Recent posts:
I speak at conferences across Europe and beyond about the JVM, eBPF, Kubernetes, observability, and AI in production. Sessionize named me Most Active Speaker in both 2023 and 2024. A few favorites:
Also on rotation: Continuous Profiling — the Missing Piece in Your Observability Puzzle and Move Fast, Build Things… Safely! — on what Formula 1 safety teaches us about system design. Full talk history on Sessionize.
Besides hosting GeeksBlaBla nearly every week, I show up as a guest now and then. Dig through the crate and click the front cover to listen!
I'm the godfather of GeeksBlaBla. What started in Ramadan 2018 as a four-episode experiment grew into hundreds of episodes of tech conversations in Moroccan Darija, a registered NGO, and a community that keeps growing, along with sister projects like BlaBlaConf, a conference entirely in Darija, and the State of Dev in Morocco survey.
Before that I founded and led developer communities across Morocco: Developer Circle Casablanca, Docker Meetup Morocco, Morocco JUG, and Arab JUG. I also served on the steering team of Devoxx Morocco, the Devoxx chapter for Africa and the MENA region.
Along the way the community work earned me a few hats: Google Developer Expert for Cloud (2023), Docker Captain (2024), and Java Champion (2024), plus Docker's Community Leader of the Year (2018) and Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador (2019).