Home //
Tech Trends for Tech Leaders
PRESENTED BY
Brian Sletten
Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting
There are certain tech trends people at least know about such as Moore's Law even if they don't really understand them. But there are other forces at play in and around our industry that are unknown or ignored by the ever diminishing tech journalism profession. They help explain and predict the pressures and influences we are seeing now or soon will.
In this talk, I will identify a variety of trends that are happening at various paces in intertwined ways at the technological, scientific, cultural, biological, and geopolitical levels and why Tech Leaders should know about them. Being aware of the visible and invisible forces that surround you can help you work with them, rather than against them. You will also be more likely to make good choices and thrive rather than being buffeted uncontrollably.
Brian Sletten
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.
More from Brian
ALL SESSIONS ↗Designed In
Do your software developers feel responsibility for the security of the systems they build? If so, are they designing security in? One of the reasons this is difficult is that they are incentivized to demonstrate that the system does what it is supposed to do. How often do we make sure it doesn't do what it is not supposed to do?
Empowering Generalists
Since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, there has been more to know every day. No individual can know it all and we have seen the entrenchment of the specialist for the past hundred or so years. When all of this tacit knowledge was locked in our heads, the specialist was rewarded for knowing details. In our industry we have seen professionals gravitate to specific languages, specific tiers in the architecture (e.g. front-end vs backend), and specific libraries or frameworks. Sometimes they will even go so far as to list specific versions of specific technologies on their resume. All of this specialization can be beneficial when you need resources that are deep within narrow confines. The ubiquitous glut of available information no longer requires us to know topics to this level of detail. Market realities are also such that nobody has the budget to employ only specialists any more. Developers have needed to learn to become designers, testers, data-experts, security-aware, AI-cognizant, and capable of communicating with various stakeholders. When your industry epitomizes unfettered change, you need to rely on generalists, not specialists; synthesizers, not knowledge keepers. How can you attract, hire, and benefit from technologists who identify as problem solving value adders rather than programmers of a specific language? How can you encourage their growth and measure success? Even more, how do you lead them yourself?
Tech Leadership in the Time of AI
The typical path to senior tech leadership involves learning the tools, tips, tricks, and artistry of using technology to further an organization's business goals while satisfying the needs of its customers. The collective experience of a leadership team benefits the entire organization by providing them the vision and capacity to make decisions in the face of technical and business change. AI has emerged like a rocketship of disruption across our industry and around the world. It has undermined the foundations on which this collective wisdom has been forged with both promises of inconceivable productivity and the fears of wide-scale obsolescence. The problem is exacerbated by the wholesale failure of tech journalism to hold AI companies and their advocates accountable for the wild claims they have put out into the world.
Two and a half days with the people writing the playbook.
Insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers — the skills and methods that take your organization to the next level.