Tenfold Campfire: Practical Skills From Real Devs

AI Governance and SafetyDovLev LehrerFernwood Agentic - CEOWhy Questions Still Matter In the Age of AICynthia LynamVictoria Data Society - PresidentCritical thinking is often treated as something abstract. The reality is that it's a set of skills you build and it looks like a very specific habit: pausing before diving into the task in front of you to ask what larger picture that task sits within. AI has made it trivial to produce an answer - a draft, a summary, a recommendation - almost instantly. What it hasn't done is improve the quality of the question behind the answer. If anything, the ease of getting output has raised the value of the person who knows what to ask for, and knows enough to recognize when the answer they got is solving the wrong problem entirely. The skill that used to differentiate a good employee was speed to an answer. Increasingly, it's the judgement to zoom out first - and the judgement is exactly what critical thinking, practiced deliberately builds over time. ---Tenfold Campfire is a twice-monthly lecture series hosted at the University of Victoria. Each session features two one-hour lectures - 45 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of questions - on a topic drawn from their real working experience: systems they've built, problems they've solved, lessons that took a career to learn.Campfire talks are topics proposed by and prepared by community members in order to pass along specialized knowledge and tricks of the craft. Come learn practical skills from real engineers solving real problems.---This event is a part of Victoria Tech Week, which runs Sept 21-25, 2026. The full calendar can be seen at victoriatechweek.ca