Some of the talks are a few years old, but I consider all talks on this page relevant for an audience today. Archived talks are listed on this page.
In the StackOverflow developer survey Rust has been the most loved programming language for five years in a row (2016-2021). Time to see why Mozilla's creation is so popular. In this talk you'll encounter many of Rust's core features on a journey through a real codebase (a genetic programming simulator). As someone who has programmed in a number of languages Erik will highlight where Rust is different from other languages and what that means in day-to-day development. You'll also get a glimpse of the growing ecosystem around Rust.
The main focus of coding assistants like Copilot is the generation of code, but they can help with other development activities, too. Based on work with a large enterprise, Erik will walk you through buillding a GitHub Copilot extension that brings information from the Backstage developer portal directly into Copilot as an agent. The extension is written in Python and showcases a full implementation of the retrival augmented generation (RAG) pattern. Knowledge of this pattern is useful in may different contexts as it has proven to be the sensible default for building information retrival systems based on LLM's. Erik will show semantic search, prompt rewriting, reranking and use of the ragas library for evals in very practical terms while implementing the extension.
More and more companies are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. For many, IT is a relevant factor, and they are looking at green computing for ideas and answers. This talk covers general principles such as carbon efficiency and carbon awareness as well as specific techniques, methods, and tools around the concept of cloud carbon footprint, including tools and techniques to measure and reduce an organisation's carbon footprint.
The title software architect comes with many connotations, and often these are not good. Developers think of hand-waivers who inhabit ivory towers and have forgotten how to write code. Project managers think of technologists who are chasing perfection in initiatives that are serving obscure technical purposes. Yet, for the success of any software project architecture is crucial. In this talk Erik will present his experience on how to address this issue, introducing techniques that help teams come up with good designs and sustainable architectures without the need for a superstar architect. Topics include evolutionary architecture, the seductive power of abstractions, vertical slicing, software visualisations, and the need to experience the consequences of decisions.
(I think this talk has aged pretty well and is still relevant. The newest version of the talk can be seen in the XConf 2021 recording linked in the sidebar.)