I’ve been on the road in Europe for the last couple of weeks, and while I was there Thoughtworks released volume 33 of our Technology Radar. Again it’s dominated by the AI wave, with lots of blips capturing our explorations of how to use LLMs and similar technology. “Agents” are the big thing these days but we’re also seeing growing movements in infrastructure orchestration, coding workflows – and the inevitable antipatterns. Many thanks to my colleagues for putting this together again.
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My trip to Europe started in Amsterdam, for a Thoughtworks event for a few of our clients there. Since I was in that lovely city, I got in touch with Gergely Orosz, host of The Pragmatic Engineer, and he arranged to record a podcast with me. No surprise that AI was front-and-center of the conversation, as I said it was the biggest shift I’d seen in programming during my career, comparable only to the shift to high-level languages, which even I am not old enough to have experienced. It was a fun chat and I really enjoyed myself. Gergely later joined myself James Lewis and Giles Edwards-Alexander at the Thoughtworks event the next day.
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My travels also took me to Nüremberg, where I attended an internal conference for Siemens on the future of software architecture. When we think of technology, it’s easy to focus on the Faangs of Silicon Valley, but Siemens have a huge workforce of software developers working on heavy engineering systems like trains and factory automation. It was good to hear them talk about federated architectures, data mesh, and their use of AI.
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I’ve often used pseudo-graphs to help explain why high quality software is cheaper. This time, Kent Beck creates a unique perspective to this chart, dispensing with the temporal axis to help think in terms of optionality.
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And in another life, Edward has finally finished the great migration of the Heavy Cardboard studio and returns to the tubes with our first game in the new digs. (No surprise that it’s Age of Steam.)
