Moving Your Bugs Forward in Time: Language Trends That Help You Catch Your Bugs at Build Time Instead of Run Time

Interview:

What's the motivation for your talk at QCon San Francisco 2024?

In my early days as a software engineer, I thought that my job was to crank out code and features as quickly as possible. But after working on many different codebases at several different companies over the years, I’ve witnessed too many of those codebases becoming unmaintainable, and watched velocity slow to a crawl. I became really eager to learn how to prevent this.

I’ve come to believe that as developers, to ensure the long-term success of our codebases, there is no single thing that we can do that is as impactful as ensuring that we structure our code to allow us to catch bugs at build time rather than at run time. So now I’m extremely passionate about sharing what I’ve learned and highlighting the powerful new trends and language features that help us achieve that goal!

What's the focus of your work?

After helping build the initial foundations for Momento’s backend services and infrastructure, I transitioned over to lead our developer ecosystem. That means that my current day job is providing clean, simple libraries that allow users to interact with Momento’s serverless cache and pub-sub products, with as little friction as humanly possible, in whatever environment they are already building things in. Nowadays, instead of building out our infrastructure, I’m focused on helping users remove things from theirs :)

Who is your talk for?

This talk is intended for software engineers, at any level, who are curious about trends in modern programming languages. If you’re interested in learning about some patterns that are starting to become popular across a variety of different languages, and how you can take advantage of them to reduce the risk of bugs surfacing in your code at runtime, then this talk will have something for you!

Is there anything specific that you'd like people to walk away with after watching your session?

We’ll learn to recognize some common programming patterns that are likely to cause bugs that can only be discovered at run time. We will discuss alternate programming strategies that can be used to move those classes of bugs forward from run time to build time. My hope is that you will walk away from this talk armed with some actionable patterns that you can apply to your own codebase, the next time you spot some code that could cause an avoidable bug!

What do you think is the next big disruption in software?

As evidenced by the fact that this year's QCon SF has an entire track about Rust, I must say that the growth in popularity in Rust feels like an important breakthrough. The Rust compiler is one of the most impressive pieces of software I've ever used, and the language idioms really help steer developers towards writing cleaner, more maintainable, bug-free code. Add in the fact that the performance is so impressive and that it's the first mainstream language I've seen that manages to avoid using a garbage collector while still managing memory on your behalf, and it feels like a pretty big paradigm shift compared to other language trends of the last 10 years.

What was one interesting thing that you learned from a previous QCon?

At QCon SF 2023, one of the talks that made a big impression on me was Shweta Saraf's talk about Multiplying Engineering Productivity. She talked about the concept of engineering leaders being "Accidental Diminishers", which can happen when leaders don't give their teammates enough ownership and space to grow. It's had a big impact on how I relate to my teammates and try to empower them. I especially loved this observation because I came to QCon expecting to take away technical learnings (which I did, in spades!), and not necessarily to walk away having learned how to be a better teammate.