Day 3 of WeAreDevelopers: from open blockchain to imagined Cardiac Overflow

Day 3 had another strong start with the talk of Andreas Antonopoulos on open blockchains and programmable money. His talk was very impactful, had plenty of humor, had one slide and was short, leaving much time for open questions. Main points:

• blockchain will be the basis of all else to come; today it is like the web was in the 90's
• closed information is becoming irrelevant; open information is what matters (e.g. corporations’ old way of keeping everything in intranets, in closed networks and how it is failing nowadays)
• blockchain is boring; it’s just a hashed list; what is really interesting is the whole mechanism which makes it similar to the Open Web
• blockchain is open, neutral, censorship resistant, borderless, decentralized (did he say this exact sentence like 5+ times? Yes he did)
• Trust + Money can now create a network protocol; which was anyway humans’ oldest technology

And some nice jokes were like

• Q: will GDPR be a problem for the blockchain? A: yes … blockchain will be a problem for GDPR (the question is not authority, but the ability to enforce it)
• you cannot create money and give it to the rich; you have Euro for that, with banks and inflation (big laughs)

My next chosen talk was Catalina Butnaru’s (City AI) on the AI Design Process. Her talk gave many examples of how AI can slide in the wrong direction and therefore must designed well from start off. She mentioned Facebook fixing AI with more AI, she gave examples of machine learning amplifying bias, she gave Wall Street examples with algorithms finding that investors who smiled more, saw their stock rise up faster. The big question is, should something really bad happen, who’s responsible for this? Who’s responsible for an AI-powered car killing people for example? And then she presented a proposed solution that you can find at HumansInAi.com.

Next I saw Stephen Fluin (Google) who talked to us about pushing the limits of the web with Angular. He gave examples from the early web, explored the solutions for that time and gave nice insights on the direction into which Angular is going nowadays. Also he showed much code and even found the hard way that the conference wi-fi was not that fast, when a package from his last demo failed to download.

• downloading from server to client still is a problem of size, even with all the bundling, and Angular will use the new Ivy for the future, which will only request the minimum required code, etc.
• Http2 will solve Get/Post problems for multiple files, by using the same connections and thus eliminating roundtrips
• Progressive web apps (PWA’s) bring service workers to create strong, offline-working web apps
• One can configure Angular to translate Typescript to ES2015 which is much smaller, but not yet supported everywhere (tsconfig.json)
• trying to combine stability with innovation, Angular has 2 major releases per year
• mentioned initiative: Angular Elements, creating custom elements for the browser

Joel Spolsky (Stack Overflow) gave a stand-up-comedy-like end show for the whole event in the afternoon. He had a room full of developers, and, as he said, we are probably all Full Stack Overflow Developers. Totally hilarious guy. He also gave us a feeling of how the conference is growing, telling us that the participants basically doubled after he closed the 2017 conference. Main points:

• SO saves impressing amounts of developer time on a world scale
• SO launched SO Teams, which is aimed to be an in-house documentation mechanism
• he mentioned rubber ducky debugging (when you explain to a ducky or any toy, how you code works, step by step) vs debug by divide and conquer
• SO rules are for making sure of quality
• regarding the fact that some users feel that the platform is not so friendly maybe, from all the rules, next year’s plans are to curate information better and create a better welcoming feeling

And fun parts:

• SO is that place you copy/paste from and then change some numbers
• on how much time SO is saving for developers (and Jon Skeet by himself, who is the platform’s #1 contributor), yay, more time to upload cat videos
• when asked how could the SO platform be applied to other domains of life, in order to save time, he imagined a Cardiac Overflow … for heart surgeons. When the doctor would open up the pacient’s chest, he would tell the nurse “nurse, please ask on the platform what the small red thingie on the right of the heart is”. The answer would be “It’s a valve, apparently”. The doctor would think a bit and ask “Well does he need it?!”

You’ll find my article on the whole event here.