Two BizStream team members are on the 2026 program at MITechCon, the Michigan Technology Conference, running October 28 through 30 at Oakland University in Rochester. Brian McKeiver and Rex Rainey are both presenting conference sessions on Friday, October 30. This year’s program includes more than 50 practitioner-led sessions and three full-day workshops across Michigan’s IT, engineering, robotics, and manufacturing communities.
MITechCon draws the people who actually build and maintain technology in Michigan, along with the product and UX leaders who shape what it delivers. Those are exactly the teams we partner with on client projects every day.
A lot of our work sits at the intersection of aging platforms and new expectations: enterprise CMS implementations, long-running product platforms, and creative work that has to move faster without getting worse. Both sessions this year come out of real project work, not theory.
Friday, October 30 at 2:30 PM, Room B
Software doesn’t stay still. Platforms accumulate technical debt, frameworks age out, and dependencies get fragile. When you’re looking at a 15-year-old system, the harder question isn’t how to modernize, it’s what to modernize.
Brian’s session works through that decision using a long-running SaaS product as a case study. He’ll cover how to decide what to refactor, what to rebuild, and what to leave alone, and how to weigh technical constraints against customer expectations and business value. It’s built for anyone leading a legacy transformation or trying to avoid one down the road.
Brian McKeiver
Co-Owner and Solution Architect, BizStream
Brian is a dual Microsoft Azure MVP for Azure AI and Azure PaaS, a Kentico MVP, and a Kontent.ai MVP. He has more than 23 years of experience leading technical strategy for clients across North America, with a focus on enterprise CMS architecture, cloud infrastructure, and systems integration. He writes about the work at Mcbeev.com.
Read Brian’s full bio | Connect on LinkedIn
Friday, October 30 at 3:45 PM, Room A
AI can speed up illustration concepting without taking over the artist’s judgment. Rex will walk through an interior graphics project and show how Adobe Firefly let him iterate on complex visual elements quickly, which freed up more time for refinement, storytelling, and craft.
If you’ve been trying to figure out where AI fits in a creative workflow, this session shows one that works.
Rex Rainey
Creative Lead, BizStream
Rex is a creative director, designer, and illustrator based in Grand Rapids. He directs branding, UX design, and illustration work across a wide range of client industries and has been combining those skills since 2005.
Registration is open at mitechcon.org. Conference passes are $299 for Thursday and Friday, and workshops are $249 for Wednesday, both available through September 30. The three-day bundle is $499, and student passes are $99, both available through October 15.
Both Brian and Rex have speaker registration links that take 10% off the Conference and Workshop Bundle, applied automatically at checkout. Those codes expire on September 30.
Register with Brian’s code | Register with Rex’s code
Not making it to Rochester? You can still connect with Brian and Rex on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.
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