What the Dev?

Dave Rubinstein was recently a guest on Torc's Guidance Counselor 2.0 live stream, and we're sharing that conversation with you here. Listen in to this special episode to learn about how community and mentorship are more important than ever as AI adoption continues. 

In this episode, Jenna interviews Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems, about how AI only really assists with a portion of the software development life cycle.They discuss:The areas that will still require a human touchThe evolution of the developer role and how success should be measured differentlyThe bottlenecks that still exist even with AI-assisted coding

This episode was originally broadcast in April 2024, and includes discussions that are still relevant to developers today, so we are publishing it again. ---In this episode, SD Times Editor-in-Chief David Rubinstein discusses how cognitive fatigue is compounding the software productivity problem. His guest is Hans Dockter, CEO at Gradle Inc. and lead at Gradle Open Source Project. 

In this episode, Dave interviews Justin Moon, vice president of Core Product Engineering at BlackBerry QNX, providers of a real-time OS for embedded systems. They discuss:How QNX is working to close the development skills gap for SDVsHow developers manage complexity in vehicle software designsThe commercial challenges for autonomous vehicle hardware

In this episode, Dave interviews Mitchell Johnson, chief product development officer at Sonatype, about the notion of a Hippocratic Oath for developers, where you do no harm to the codebase, and how AI is impacting that.They discuss:The responsibility a developer has to keeping their codebase healthy whenever they add a new featureHow being able to output code faster with AI makes it harder to have visibility into how changes impact downstream systemsHow AI assisted coding may actually slow things down

In this episode, Dave interviews Angie Jones, VP of engineering for AI Tools & Enablement at the financial services company Block.They discuss: How AI is empowering a new wave of developers from non-traditional rolesThe importance of feeding AI models and agents important business contextBlock's coding agent Goose 

In this episode, Dave interviews Dave Protasowski, a member of the steering committee for Knative, about the project's recent graduation from the CNCF. They discuss: An overview of what Knative doesThe history of the project at the CNCFWhat's in store for Knative in the future

Jenna interviews Pia Nilsson, a Senior Director at Spotify specializing in enhancing developer productivity, who led the creation of Aika, Spotify's internal AI tool. They delve into why Spotify chose to build Aika rather than using existing solutions, exploring its daily applications for developers in onboarding and troubleshooting. Pia shares insights on Aika's integration with tools like Backstage and GitHub, and discusses the challenges faced during its development. Exciting future possibilities for Aika are also teased, including enhancements to Spotify's Portal.

In this episode, Jenna interviews Khachatur Virabyan, head of code quality at Aikido Security, about why code quality and security should be addressed together.They discuss:The differences in definitions for code quality and securityHow clean code could still have vulnerabilitiesThe impact AI coding will have on code quality and security

In this episode, Dave interviews Mark Lambert, chief product officer of ArmorCode, about how AI is influencing Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).They discuss:How AI-generated code has more vulnerabilities than human-generated codeThe risks of slowing down innovation while trying to govern AI-assisted developmentUsing AI agents for automated testing and security vulnerability detection