Computer science and software development are relatively young fields of interest. However, a lot of excellent ideas and work has been produced in that short span of time. Some of these ideas have flourished, some have been transformed and others have been lost to the sands of time and are languishing in obscurity.
Let's take a close look at a few of the ideas in software development that have had ebbs and flows through the years. By looking at how some ideas have evolved in the past might be instrumental in understanding the future of our industry and how we develop software going forward.
The intended audience for this talk are software developers in general.
The expected outcome of the talk is for listeners to think more deeply about the problems they are solving and to make them think about the history and context in which they are building their solutions.
The talk will follow this outline:
The proposed speaker has been working professionally in the software industry for over 20 years and during that time has had the privilege of working with various technologies. He experienced, witnessed and participated in the evolution of global communication from FTP and Gopher sites to the rich Web that we use and love today. He has had the opportunity to develop web, desktop, server and conversational software using static and dynamically typed languages throughout his career.
Finally, for the last 3 years he has been teaching an International Baccalaureate Computer Science course to high school students where he had the chance to present a more holistic overview of what software development is and how the technologies we use today have evolved into what they are now.