Talk summary: Leading a Team of Developers Using AI by Venkat Subramaniam

I attended NFJS’s Tech Leader Summit conference in Florida last week. One of the talks was “Leading a Team of Developers Using AI” from Venkat Subramaniam.

AI has changed software development irrevocably. We should lean in and play to AI’s strengths, while utilizing the skills that we as engineers still bring to the table. Machines are fast at finding patterns in large data sets, but humans have the critical thinking and intelligence to see beyond existing data sets.

While typing raw code may soon be over, many skills remain essential:

• Problem solving
• Understanding requirements (which may be incomplete and contradictory)
• Handling trade offs
• Communicating

Maintainability, reliability, performance, security and robustness all remain important aspects of software projects that AI may not address sufficiently.

AI has been trained on vast amounts of code written by humans. But much of it is bad (we’ve all written bad code). And now humans complain that AI generates bad code. That is karma!
AI can’t differentiate good code from bad. But you can, especially in the context of your current environments and needs.

Use AI for

• ideas, not solutions
• prototypes, not production code (AI can allow you to bring new ideas to test the market much faster. Similar to how 3D printing did for physical objects)
• finding bugs in and documenting existing code, not writing new code (AI excels at finding issues in complex code that humans struggle to understand)

 

Tags: conferencetalks, nfjs, nofluffjuststuff, summary, venkatsubramaniam

Talk summary: Reactive DDD by Vaughn Vernon @ QCon2018

Some notes on the “Reactive DDD – When Concurrent Waxes Fluent” talk by Vaughn Vernon (author of Implementing Domain-Driven Design) at QCon 2018. (Currently I think you need to be logged in as a ticket holder to see the talk – I will post a link if it becomes public)

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Tags: conferencetalks, cqrs, ddd, qcon, qcon18, summary

Testing in Production Presentation – SVCC 2018

The following post is essentially a written version of the Testing in production talk I gave at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2018. You can find the presentation deck here at slideshare.

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Tags: chaos, chaosengineering, conferencetalks, For prep, integrationtesting, itestinprod, mytalks, production, resilience, resilienceengineering, Testing, testinginproduction

Talk summary: Chaos Engineering by Adrian Cockroft @ ChaosConf18

Title: Chaos Engineering – What is it, where did it come from, and where might it be going?

Speaker: Adrian Cockcroft (AWS VP Cloud Architecture Strategy)

Conference: Chaos Conference 2018 (http://chaosconf.io/)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cefJd2v037U

The following are some brief notes and slide summaries from Adrian’s keynote at ChaosConf 2018…

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Tags: chaosconf, chaosengineering, conferencetalks, summary

Notes from TechKnowCon 2018

I attended TechKnowCon (https://techknowcon.splashthat.com/) this week. I enjoyed the  conference a lot. It centered around the theme of continuous learning, and how to instill a learning culture in your work environment. There were 2 talks in particular that I got a lot from, “Teach Like an Engineer” and “Peer learning at scale”…

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Tags: conferencetalks, learning, techknowcon, techknowhow

Talk summary: How Complex Systems Fail by Dr Richard Cook @ Velocity 2012

“How Complex Systems Fail” is a talk by Dr Richard Cook at Velocity 2012.

I’ve included a link to the video on YouTube below, and some of my key takeaway points.

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Tags: conferencetalks, resilience, resilienceengineering, summary