GIDS - Day 3 Learnings

I was lucky to attend Day 3 of Great International Developer Summit that happened in "Namma Bengaluru" from 23-26 April 2024 at IISC.

Day had multiple sessions which covered diversified topics on GenAI, Open Technologies, Techno Managers, Software Quality & Delivery and Architects.

Sharing some of the important learnings from the event in this article for my own reference and also for someone who would find these learnings useful :)

GenAI

• General message is that GenAI is here to stay, already passed the buzz phase and many thought leaders across top organizations are identifying ways to improve customer experience, business and profits. They strongly feel GenAI gives them tools to define the North star and get there.
• Three things are important to achieve "PoC to Production" for any GenAI solution. 1) Good data 2) Pipeline 3) Deep focus on the problem.
• What you did this week might become obsolete on Monday morning with GenAI but that's the fast pace with which the technology is going, so nothing wrong to change things quickly if they give benefits for cost, customer or business.
• GenAI eco-system is growing and you have answers for most concerns like privacy, guardrails, latency etc. Keep moving forward if you are solving a good problem for your customers.

Technologies

• "Knowledge graphs" are a reliable option for grounding LLMs with their ability to represent both structured and unstructured data, unlike vector databases. Check this link - https://neo4j.com/blog/unifying-llm-knowledge-graph/
• Neo4j has partnered with Docker, LangChain, and Ollama to announce the "GenAI Stack" – a pre-built development for creating GenAI applications. Check this link - https://neo4j.com/developer-blog/genai-app-how-to-build/
• Zoho's Catalyst, "The simplest pro-code development platform" is very interesting for any builder. Check this link - https://catalyst.zoho.com/
• Many developers like Google's technologies for its "simplicity to use" it. Check this - https://cloud.google.com/vertex-a and they seem to get many things right to build an eco-system to help take your idea and test it.
• Technology trends from Thoughtworks https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-in/insights/blog/technology-strategy/macro-trends-tech-industry-april-2024 shows how fast things are changing and would help some of the organization's strategy if you take relevant inputs.
• Own your stack (from UI to Infrastructure) to take care of your end to end customer experience or things like security & privacy. Check this link - https://www.zoho.com/sites/zweb/images/zoho_general_pages/zoho-pros-and-cons-of-the-full-stack-approach.pdf

Effective Technical Manager

There was a wonderful talk on "Habits of a highly effective technical manager" and 4 things stood out for me.

• Match personality to position - Everyone won't be good at everything. Ensure you leverage strengths of every member in the best manner by matching their personality to job role.
• Keep asking what are our goals - Whenever there is a debate on technology, user experience, programming language, ask the team "what are our goals" and everyone would get back their focus.
• Plans are nothing; Planning is everything - Keep your team adaptive and never say this is our plan and we cannot change it. Plans can be changed if you sit for planning and prioritize new things.

Good to Great Architect

There was an insightful session on "Leapfrogging from Good to a Great Architect" and every learning shared by the speaker is piece of gold and sharing 5 of them below.

• Build your internal network - When things aren't going as per plans, you need your network to go and ask for support.
• Catch your biases - Avoid biases on technology, personality, attitude. It can all change and don't limit yourself and your team.
• Mentor others genuinely - If you do that, the mentee grows and mentor invariably grows.
• Move away from comfort zone - Pick up assignments where there are unknowns and new people. That's the best way to learn new things and build visibility.
• Stand for your team - Outside the room stand for your team and team's mistakes are your mistakes.

Software quality & delivery

• Knowing is not doing - Knowing best practices to develop software is not enough, you have to follow them.
• Relevance of CD - Continuous delivery brings relevance to all engineers to come to work with purpose, to see that their code & deliverables are reaching the customers and they can expect timely feedback.
• Quality is an investment - Without investing in quality, you cannot be Agile. Read it again to see how easy it is but limitedly followed.

Hope you find the article interesting and insightful.

If you want to discuss a specific topic and get more details, feel free to reach out to me and I would be happy to help without charging anything :)