Summary

Disclaimer: This summary has been generated by AI. It is experimental, and feedback is welcomed. Please reach out to info@qconsf.com with any comments or concerns.

The presentation Directing a Swarm of Agents for Fun and Profit by Adrian Cockcroft explores innovative approaches to using coding agents effectively in both personal and work projects.

Speaker Introduction: Adrian Cockcroft, known for his work as a cloud architect for Netflix and an advocate of DevOps, discusses managing coding agents like a director managing a team.
Main Concept: Cockcroft emphasizes dedicating time to experiment with these tools for personal enjoyment and work efficiency.
Fun and Profit Approach: He encourages trying new tools in personal projects, identifying effective practices, and leveraging them in professional settings. This process helps in completing projects quickly and profitably.
Development Techniques: He shares durable techniques like starting in Python and translating to desired languages, using BDD structures, and following Tidy First approaches before adding functionality.
Challenges and Opportunities:
- Coding agents can operate quickly, akin to multiple days of work done in minutes.
- Rapid evolution of tools necessitates continuous learning and adaptation.
- AI development will require organizations to adapt their structures to keep pace.
Future of Coding: The evolution of AI in coding is rapidly changing, with new tools emerging frequently, making it crucial to experiment to stay ahead of the curve.
Conclusion: Emphasizes the importance of play in learning and innovating, and shares examples of successful public projects and open-source contributions.

Overall, the presentation highlights the importance of exploring AI tools for personal growth and work efficiency while adapting organizational structures to support fast-paced developments.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Abstract

Coding agents are a new tool, which many of us are trying to figure out how to use effectively. The domains that coding agents work well for is also expanding, and tools and best practices are evolving extremely rapidly, so it's hard to keep up and develop durable techniques and know whether you are in the zone or on thin ice. The approach I advocate is to dedicate an unusual amount of time to having fun with the tools, trying things out on personal projects and filter for things that seem to be working well to use for work projects.

The work projects will usually complete extremely quickly and profitably if this approach is working well, and make time for some more fun projects. I've developed some durable techniques, like building and testing in Python first, then translating to whatever language you really wanted to use. Using Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) Given/When/Then structures for tests.

Following Kent Beck's Tidy First mantra, and cleaning up before adding more functionality, etc. and I'll talk about what I've found to work, share the fun public projects I've been working on, and some thoughts on how organizational structures will be impacted by having development capacity be an on on-demand capability.

Speaker

Adrian Cockcroft

Technology Advisor and Consultant @OrionX.net, Previously VP Open Source and Sustainability @Amazon, Cloud Architect @Netflix, Distinguished Engineer @eBay

Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, equally at home with hardware and software, development and operations. He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today.

Adrian spent the last few years as a VP at Amazon deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon itself – one of the largest companies in the world – become more sustainable, and via AWS – one of the largest technology suppliers in the world – helping its enterprise and public sector customers become more sustainable.

Adrian has a BSc in Applied Physics and Electronics from The City University, London, UK. He’s a frequent speaker and has keynoted many events for AWS including many of the AWS Global Summit series, and has presented at many events such as the Monitorama, GOTO, YOW, QCon and DevOps Days conferences. He’s held past advisory positions at the following companies (acquired by): DeepDyve, Liquid Robotics (Boeing), Apcera (Ericsson), Ayla Networks, NGINX (F5), Docker, Instana (IBM), and Gremlin. He currently advises Nubank, Netai.ai, and a few stealth startups.