The Conference

VenkatSubramanianAtGOTOChicago2024The GOTO organization's first stated goal is: "GOTO gathers the brightest minds in the software community to help developers tackle projects today, plan for tomorrow and create a better future."

One way they accomplish this is by hosting conferences all over the world. This week, the organizers brought this conference to the Convene Conference space in Chicago's Willis Tower. I attended Monday and Tuesday, which featured presentations from a wide variety of speakers.

The agenda broke the schedule into fifteen time slots over the first two days, as follows:

  • 7 keynote sessions. These were the only talks offered during that time, so nearly everyone attended
  • 7 sets of parallel sessions. During these times, the conference offered 3-4 different talks, allowing attendees to choose what they wanted to hear
  • 1 set of Lightning Talks. These spanned two time slots and featured a set of shorter presentations.
  • 1 hands-on lab ("Your First AI-Assisted Pull Request for Good"), which spanned two sessions.

I did not attend the third day, which featured workshops on building AI applications and on authentication.

Sessions

Here are some key takeaways I received from the sessions I attended:

"Decision Dials" by Venkat Subramaniam

Venkat listed tradeoffs in application architecture, software engineering, career choices, and life. For most tradeoffs, the choice depends on the context of the problem. For example, it is important to set boundaries by saying "No" to requests, but early in one's career, one may wish to say "Yes" more often to get more opportunities.

"Where AI Meets Code" by Michael Feathers

MichaelFeathersAtGOTOChicago2024Michael is known for his work on refactoring legacy code, but he is currently writing a book about using artificial intelligence. He described some patterns for effectively working with AI.

"Vanilla Web: You Don't Need That Library" by Maximiliano Firtman

Maximiliano described the value of web frameworks and the danger of overusing them. This overuse has led to a recent trend toward writing "Vanilla JavaScript" (i.e., JavaScript code without using a framework). He demonstrated simple code that could replace functionality we often implement using a heavy framework.

"How AI Will Bring Computing to Everyone" by Matt Welsh

MattWelshAtGOTOChicago2024Matt talked about the current state of AI - particularly the generative AI capabilities of ChatGPT. He cautioned about the range of usefulness of these tools in different parts of the world. For example, many countries have an average annual salary so low that most citizens cannot afford $20 a month for an AI service. Also, although ChatGPT works well in English, it is less accurate in some other popular languages.

Monday Evening Meetup

Monday evening, I hosted a meeting of the Chicago Java User Group at which keynote speaker Venkat Subramaniam delivered a presentation titled "Scaling Up with Virtual Threads in Java," in which he described ways to implement non-blocking asynchronous programming in Java on the same or different threads.

Conclusion

I enjoyed the sessions and the people I met at this event. I hope to attend the next time GOTO comes to Chicago, and I aspire to speak at one of their conferences someday.

You can learn more about this at https://gotochgo.com/2024