A Day in the Life of a Software Developer, 2031 Edition

I thought I’d post something a little different, and take a fun look at what might the day in the life of a software developer might look like in 15 years.  I could be way off with much of this, with respect to the technologies.  I’m purely writing and posting this to have a fun and creative outlet – it’s not intended to be any kind of definitive prediction of what might be coming - so please don't take it too seriously. 

Let’s set the stage here before our story begins:  the year is now 2031, and our protagonist is Tara, who has been a professional software developer for 15 years.  Tara works for AgileThink, a highly successful software company specializing in tools for the accounting and financial services industries.  

2031.05.15  7:32AM EST, Tampa, Florida

Tara said goodbye to her boys as they ran out the front door, and dashed off down the street to catch the transport to school.  She had just gone through her normal morning routine, and a request for a commute to work was automatically triggered by her digital personal assistant.  It was a Tuesday, and that was one of her days she spent in the office for face time with her team.  Her digital assistant had learned her commute patterns, and had finally matched her with a good group to ride the automated commute transport with into the metro area.  She finished getting ready, and walked out the front door, blasted by the Florida sun and humidity of late spring.  The ring on her right ring finger vibrated subtly, indicating that her ride was arriving, and moments later at the edge of her driveway, she climbed into the cab of the transport. 

The usual Tuesday crew was already inside, chatting about upcoming last few days of school, and plans for the summer.  Tara didn’t feel like talking this morning, so she grabbed a piece of e-ink paper that was left behind in the pocket of the door.  The paper picked up her identity, and displayed her calendar for the day and a few relevant news stories to read during her ride into work.  She fortunately was the last pickup in this now full transport, and the 120 km commute to downtown Orlando would be over in about 20 minutes as the transport was able to use the high-speed lane down Interstate 4.  As she buzzed along at close to 500 kilometers per hour, she recalled a time not long ago when this was a 2-hour car drive. 

8:03AM, Orlando, Florida, USA

After arriving in downtown and saying goodbye to her co-riders, she headed into her building, and hopped on the mag-elevator, shooting upwards to the 19th floor.  She found that she still needed to hold on during these quick blasts, and sometimes it made her queasy.  She kind of missed the old cable and pulley systems sometimes – they were slower, but at least you never got motion sickness.  

She headed to area where her team usually congregated, and passed by the kitchen.  She picked up her latte that had already been automatically prepared for her as she was arriving.  When she got to her team’s area, nobody was there yet.  No matter, she thought.  She needed a few minutes to catch up on the work that was completed yesterday.  She walked up to a desk.  It was nothing but a slick flat surface with no adornments.   As she approached it, it began to come alive.  It elevated itself to exactly where she preferred.  Sometimes she sat, but she found standing the best way to interact with her development tools.   Four three-dimensional holographic images appeared.  In the right corner, pictures of her boys hovered above the surface.  In the left corner, icons representing her team members floated in a 3x2 grid.  In the middle of the desk, a condensed graphical model of new algorithm she and her team were working on sat next to icons representing her developer tools.  She engaged the sonic condenser, sort of a local area noise canceller that makes the space around her desk nearly impervious to outside noise and the noise she was about to make communicating with her development tools.  When Tara had started her career, open workspaces were all the rage, but many people found them spaces to work in when voice controlled tools became the norm.  

8:09AM

With her workspace now set and her work day to now begin, Tara sighed loudly and said “open model”.  The small cube representing her teams model that had been hovering over her desk blossomed open into a complicated structure that looked like a cross between a DNA double-helix and an MC Escher painting.

The first thing she wanted to do was to test the new training data that had been made available to them, and test their model against it.

“Load training data and execute test harness” she said, commanding the system.

The model of her team’s hologram, which had been slowly rotating, morphed into a flat plane displaying information about the load status of the training data and the live test results.  It takes a few minutes to process several petabytes of data, even on their development systems, so while was processing, she waved her hand to dismiss that hologram and said “Comm portal”.  She flipped through a couple of messages about what other teams were up to, and scanned communication from the CEO about an upcoming acquisition.  Nothing terribly interesting.  The new AI-based communications assistant her company had installed a few years ago had really learned to cut down on the amount of communications that flowed between people, mostly through intelligent replies.  A few years ago, if you sent an email to someone with a question in it, you’d have to wait hours or days before they replied.  Now, the timescale was typically within a minute because the AI system would figure out what was being asked, and then reply based on what it had learned from the recipient.  From that perspective, her life as a developer had been hugely improved – she spent time solving problems and creating features, not spending half her day in her old email program.

But right now, she was waiting on her test run to finish.

“Hey!” Bob said as he tapped her on the shoulder.

She jumped a little bit as she didn’t hear him walking up behind her.  Part of the downside of these sonic condensers.  You stood in a cone of silence, and the cone didn’t let sound in or out.

“How’s our model doing?” Bob said. 

“Well, let’s see.  OK, it just finished now”.

She gestured and the model test run results were displayed. 

“Hmmm…still only 98.9%.  Not good enough.” Bob sighed.

“Yeah, that 1.1% is always the killer part to get right.  But that 1.1% could possibly bankrupt a customer.” 

“I still think it’s our response-based approachability algorithm.” Bob said as he scratched his goatee.  “Let me drive and we’ll dig into this”. 

Bob nudged past Tara to stand in front of the desk.  He began controlling the model using gestures to drill down to the algorithm in question.  Tara pursed her lips and felt frustrated.  When she had begun her career, she sat at a desk actually typing code – mostly logic trees, and working with programming objects to bind together different components.  She even did some user interface design, and got to work with databases.  Now she worked with a team mostly made up of people with advanced degrees in mathematics.  Bob had a PhD in applied mathematics, and had forgotten more about topics like calculus than Tara had ever learned.  She did have an edge over many on her team though, as she knew the domain better than she knew her own children, and knew how to create new offerings her company could add to their software products that their customers wanted.   She loved working with her team, but there were things they could do that she felt like she could never learn.  It didn’t matter though, as that’s what made their team great – they worked together, used each other’s strengths and created really profitable products.  They were considered one of the highest performing teams in the company.

Her mind wandered off a bit as Bob talked to himself while he diagnosed how that algorithm was constructed.   He would use the voice commands and gestures on the holographic representation of their model, occasionally asking Tara a question.  She would always cheerfully reply, and despite her frustration in not being able to directly help, they were getting somewhere. 

11:45AM 

Tara’s finger buzzed, and an alert flashed on the desktop that it was time to eat.  Her blood sugar was dropping down past the point of being able to concentrate. 

“Bob, let’s break here and grab some food – I’m not sure where the others are at.”

They took the stairs down one floor, and their names appeared above table 20, which was open.  They sat down, and their two other team members, Andy and Maddie appeared and sat down with them. 

“Hey guys!  How’s the day going? Where ya been?” Tara asked curiously.

“Oh man, we got pulled into another team’s issues.  We were walking through the lobby this morning when Sandy from Ops yanked us aside and railed on us for 20 minutes about how the integration team is breaking their entire strategy for shipping new features by screwing up the process with manual steps.” said Andy.

Maddie smiled “They are asking them to manually configure things that either shouldn’t be touched or are already automated.  She begged us to spend a few hours with them helping them get their stuff straightened out.  We had seen you walk in right before us, so we figured you had it under control.” 

“Hey, we can’t all be as good as us, right?”  Bob joked.

As they all laughed, the lunch drone slowly descended in the middle of their table and displayed menus to them.  They all tapped on what they wanted, and the drone quietly hovered away as they continued their conversation.  Bob and Tara filled in Andy and Maddie on the algorithm problems they looked at this morning.

A few minutes later, the drone appeared again and gently set down their lunches. 

“Bob, did you get that new entangled router for your house yet?”  Andy asked.

“No, I’m still waiting on it from the facilities team.  They say it’ll be ready for me to take home today.  Something about solar flares interrupting the entanglement process.”  Bob said as he laughed. “Whatever it takes I guess…I just have the need for speed!” 

Communicating with Bob’s hologram when he worked from home was painful because of his ancient fiber optic network connection.  Everyone but him already had a new quantum entangled network endpoint that provided basically unlimited bandwidth too the network, but the setup was still a pain.  It was a newer technology, and there were all sorts of hiccups and issues, when it worked, it was incredible. 

The team finished up lunch and headed back up the stairs to the team area to continue their debugging session.

3:30PM

Tara’s smart ring buzzed three times, just enough to disrupt her train of thought.  Then a small smiled wiped across her face as she knew her boys were now home safely from school.  While she was enjoying collaborating with her team face to face, she was also hoping that they’d be wrapping this up soon and she could head home to see her family. 

4:15PM

“Ok guys, check this out.” Bob said.

“Let’s make this one last tiny tweak and if that looks good, we’ll rebuild the model, and then we can let it rip.”

Bob deftly changed the last mathematical calculation, and gestured for a small set of tests to run.  A moment later, a “100%” message flashed to the team, and they shared a group high-five.

“Sweet!” said Andy “I think we might have done it!” 

“Well, it certainly looks promising” Tara said. “But let’s recompile the entire thing now and run it through not just the new set of training data, but let’s give it a pass through all our old training data sets just to see what happens.” 

The team agreed.

“Full model recompile and complete historical test harness” Tara ordered their development toolset.  The hologram of their model again morphed into a flat plane, hovering a few inches above the desk.  A countdown timer read “2:06:32” and counted down the seconds until completion.   

“Great job today team!  This is going to take a while so let’s wrap it up and regroup tomorrow at 8:30 in the holo team room to see how we did.  Good?” 

“It’s only 4:15, who wants to join me at the pub?” Maddie asked.

“I’m in!” “I’m in!”

Tara smiled and said she’d have one for the team when she got home. 

The team departed to the ground floor, and went their separate ways.   

Tara waved to her team as she hopped into the transport on the way home.   A few minutes later, along the old I-4 corridor, the trees whipped by her at breathtaking speed as she gazed out the window.  She thought deeply about how her team solved the problem today, and tried to think of a creative way to not have the problem occur again.  

Before she could find the answer, the door swung open, and she could see her boys coming out of her front door.   She tried to clear her head as she climbed out, as she was about to tackle her favorite part of the day…