We Are Developers Conference in Berlin

I meant to post this right after the conference, but I got Covid, so I was knocked out for a week. Well, here it comes.

So my company decided that we were gonna join the We Are Developers conference in Berlin. Which I never had heard about before, but I’ve been to conferences in Berlin twice before. Actually, I’ve been to a conference at the same venue before, CityCube, So I knew it was going to be a blast… mostly I was looking forward to get a full night sleep after 2 years of having babies. Spoiler alert… Berlin doesn’t alow it. Or my brain has accustomed to be alert for waking up incase the babies needs to be taken care of, different story.

Anyways, so because of the pandemic and other personal development decisions, it’s been a while since I attended a tech con, so I was very excited. The Keynote speaker on the first day, Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Github. I had no clue who he was, I know of Tim… whatever his name is, founder of Github and that they used Ruby on Rails and the Open Source community of course, because that’s what we do. And I use Github, mostly more then anything in my profession. So I was very excited to listen to him. I’ve been exploring lots of features on Github, and being more active in communities then ever before. Perhaps I’ll write a blog post about that too, got lots to say about that.

Well, he presented himself and talked about being a Berliner and he was very happy to be back in his hometown. He shared som nostalgic pictures, and he was very open and personal. The key take away from his presentation was CoPilot and Cospaces.

CoPilot, an AI assistant when you are coding. The immediate question that rose in my mind was. If students starts to use this technology, will they learn what the code actually does? I mean, googling code snippets and copy pasting from stackoverflow still pushes you to actively think and search for information, which is as good skill as anything else and you still need to validate your code. My concern is that people are going to use it as a shortcut to put in less effort to actually learn what they are doing.

I got the privilege to sit in the front row while Thomas Dohmke got interviewed after lunch, I had a couple of questions on my mind and I wanted to learn more about his opinion in this area.

I’m interested in Neuroscience and evolutionary theories. I’m a Step 1 graduate in Neuro-leadership. So naturally, I’m aware of biases and how our brains subconsciously seeks shortcuts to minimize activity in our prefrontal cortex. Take the Google effect as an example; subconsciously our brains choses not to memorize information that we don’t actively need. Ask your partner, spouse or kids for an example, or ask your best friend, if they know your phone number by heart. Most likely they don’t. Because why should we memorize something that we can store in our pocket memory, a.k.a our mobile phones. Our brains are lazy! It’s trying to save energy in case you need to escape a lion or defend yourself against gorillas or whatever.

Is that the end of developers?

Well no. I got the chance to ask Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of Github. And he had a great answer to my similar question; If programmers are going to get dumber?

Now I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember word by word what he replied, but basically he said. Since the art of printing press, or typewriting, or libraries. People have been scared of the changes that come and we are reluctant to change. But those who adapt and learn how to utilize new technology will get a huge advantage in their profession.

Just like Yuval Noah Harari said in his Talks at Google, “Emotional Intelligence” is the most important thing we can teach our kids and young students, because we can’t prepare for all the changes that will come as technology enters our lives more and more.

Should we be worried then?

Well, I can put it this way.

I have installed it in my VS Code and as with everything it takes some time to adapt and get used to it. But I foresee that it will improve my productivity and I can focus more in other areas.

And if you’re not keeping up with the technology, AI won’t replace you, but someone who uses it will.

So instead of asking if AI is going to take our jobs, we need to adapt and re-imagine ourselves.