Efficiency, productivity, cognitive load, and a whiff of AI
The most famous speakers at GOTO-Aarhus 2023 included
- Jez Humble: Site Reliability Engineer at Google and author of numerous influential books, including "Accelerate", "Lean Enterprise", and "The DevOps Handbook"
- Troy Hunt: Security researcher at Microsoft and founder of “Have I Been Pwned”; works regularly with law enforcement agencies
- James Lewis: Software Architect and Director at Thoughtworks
- Lee Mills: Senior Engineering Manager at Spotify with a focus on developer productivity
- Evan Czaplicki: Creator of the Elm programming language
Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT
The currently hyped topic of “artificial intelligence” (AI) was only addressed directly in a welcome speech. Preben Thoroe (CTO of Trifork) had ChatGPT generate the welcome speech and read it out via text-to-speech.
He then used a short code example to show why he thinks it unlikely that AI will replace large parts of jobs in software development in the short term. In the example, ChatGPT should interpret and generate code. ChatGPT made incomprehensible errors during both tasks.
In the Q&A sessions, which were scheduled at the end of each talk, there were often questions about starting points and possible effects of AI on the respective topic. Most of the answers were that we do not yet know exactly how and where we can best use AI. AI will find its way into everyday working life, at least as an improved tool.
Satisfaction and productivity
In his great talk, ”How Work Works” James Lewis described what constitutes professional software development and why certain working methods are proven to work. Using simulation results, he showed why reducing batch sizes during development leads to better results and greater productivity. Based on research from Google re:work, he discovered that the most important characteristics of members of efficient teams are exclusively soft skills. Psychological safety within the team is most important.
Cognitive load
Cognitive load was described as a negative factor in several talks. A high cognitive load leads to poor quality, low efficiency and uncertain systems.
Known principles such as immutability, explicit state machines, separation of data and logic and the “actor model" can represent one way to reduce complexity and thus cognitive load at code level. Bram Verburg explained in his talk, ”Concurrency Abstractions for Application Security”, why these and additional security aspects are important and how the Erlang programming language supports them.
Eleanor Saitta spoke in her talk “Principles for Secure and Reliable Systems” about what constitutes secure systems and how security incidents can be prevented. She emphasized that the probability of a security incident for a relevant system is very high. She explained how important it is to plan for such a case and to deal with the situation in the best possible way.
A practical tip from the talk is to periodically rebuild backend containers. If an attacker were to make it into a system, this would at least make it much more difficult to stay in that system.
Eleanor Saitta listed code complexity and cognitive load as security risks for systems.
Lee Mills explained how you can use a developer portal to reduce the cognitive load of developers by bundling necessary information and tools in one portal. This means that developers should no longer have to open several browser tabs and tools at the same time in order to complete a task.
Lee Mills presented Spotify's open-source project “Backstage”, which makes it easy to create developer portals.
In his talk ”Enabling Developers in a Multi-Cloud World“ Mauricio Salatino spoke about how developers can make it easier to use Kubernetes-based infrastructures as another way to reduce complexity and cognitive load on developers. Mauricio Salatino is the author of the book ”Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes“ and a contributor to several open-source Kubernetes projects. In the talk, he presented Crossplane, vCluster, ArgoCD, KNative and Dapr with live demos.
More highlights
In a brilliant talk, ”Digitalization and Humanization: Navigating the Intersection of Technology and Humanity”, Imran Rashid explained in an entertaining way how the human brain works and why certain apps work so “well” in terms of generating profit for app operators. At the same time, he described the negative effects on users and appealed to them to use digital technologies more consciously.
Using illustrative examples and human behavior patterns, he explained why these apps generate attention, what attention means for the human brain and what work the brain does in doing so.
A central message of the talk was the importance of mental breaks, in particular breaks without a smartphone: “Think less, feel better”.
Troy Hunt told anecdotes via video about criminal platforms and people who made a profit from stealing and selling online login data—and about Troy Hunt's joy when they were caught by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. He explained how he uses the “Have I Been Pwned” platform in collaboration with law enforcement agencies to prevent misuse and data theft.
He emphasized how important it is to use different passwords for different accounts and a simple notebook for your own passwords could prevent a very large number of account thefts (unless a password manager is used).
In the talk, he gave examples of how ignorantly some companies, authorities and organizations deal with data leaks and try to deny them. With the simplest means, e.g. with a /.well-known/security.txt, it would be possible to give non-criminals an opportunity to report data leaks and avoid any public reports.
He is often contacted by people who cannot find a way to report a data leak. In such cases, Troy Hunt makes public contact with the companies, authorities or organizations about the concerns, for example via a tweet. He jokingly added in the talk that no one would definitely want to be mentioned in such a public tweet from him.
Sam Aaron demonstrated how to teach children programming in an interesting way. To do this, he used the open-source tool he created SonicPi. SonicPi allows you to compose and perform music in a very simple programming language.
The presentation, which was accompanied by lots of music, was inspired by the motivation and enthusiasm that Sam Aaron sprayed on stage. He got asked why programming is not taught to all students in schools. He countered the argument that not all students become programmers later on by saying that not all children become professional athletes, but that all children have physical education lessons.
Finally, he appealed to teach children the fascinating aspects of programming in an interesting way. In his experience, music enables significantly more children to find access to programming than sorting algorithms, for example.
Personal conclusion
I really enjoyed attending the conference, reinforced by the fact that I haven't attended a conference for several years, partly due to Corona. In addition to a great atmosphere and lots of interesting people, I was able to take away a lot from the talks for everyday work, for my professional goals and also for myself personally. The conference motivates people to question what already exists and encourages changes to be made.
I would like to thank the great organizing team and the fantastic speakers. I highly recommend that everyone attend a conference—particularly a GOTO conference.
