Session: What’s Your Future as a Developer?
When did you know that you would become a developer?
For some of you, it started in childhood, playing video games and wondering how they did the things they do. For others, the revelation came in class, in the school computer lab. Still others programmed as a hobby, building cool stuff and automating boring tasks in their spare time. And more than a few of you fell into it as adults, after chasing other dreams entirely.
In this presentation, Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, will discuss how the computer revolution has always been intertwined with dreams — first of individuals, like the 19th-century technologist Ada Lovelace and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and later of entire communities, with the introduction of Linux.
He’ll outline the challenges that have risen lately to following a developer’s career path: the rise of generative AI, which can handle routine coding tasks but threatens to abstract away the very things devs love to do. The battle over keeping popular software like Terraform and Redis open source. And the scrambled corporate landscape wrought by an era of layoffs, mergers and acquisitions.
What does all this mean for what developers’ jobs will look like five years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now?
Alex will share data that indicates where the most (and least) promising speciality areas are likely to be for developers and technologists in the years to come. And he’ll be joined by our guest expert(s), who will take a glimpse into the future and tell us what they see. Afterward, we’ll answer your questions about the future of development work.
This session will be recorded
