Developer Tech Trends – Mike Loukides, O’Reilly Media

This is Textron TV. Hey everybody. I'm very pleased that I'm being joined today by Mike the kitties who is VP of emerging technology content with O'Reilly media.

Welcome Mike. Oh, thanks. Good to have you here, you know, I want to get to this report that you all just recently issued about what your readers are interested in before we do that tell us a little bit about yourself and what your role is that right?

okay, I've been I've been in a Riley for a long time since 1990 actually Tim says I was the first editor which I actually disagree with but we can find out. You know, I'm I'm but my my current role is my current role is that I watch out for new technologies that we need to be that that we need to be covering. I tend to you know, Wrangle the people who are on the Acquisitions and editorial staff to find the right people to write about them or teach about them.

And and we go from there a lot of my a lot of what I do is writing reports is is writing reports like this. So I'm sort of like, you know, There's a few there's a few of us at O'Reilly that are sort of the think tank and I'm I suppose I'm part of that. That's like a fun fun job.

Fantastic. Well, no, I'm good O'Reilly. I mean gosh Everett or O'Reilly books, maybe nearly that long, but that's awesome.

It's well, it has been fun. And that's that's you know, that's what that's That's a lot of why I'm still here. So and also I've been working.

I've been working at home the entire time. So it's it's sort of funny when the pandemic came and people ask what's it like to work at home? It's like, you know.

Same that's been before the pandemic right if you yeah, if you if you want to go back to 1991. There is actually an article in some Connecticut Business Journal about this weird guy who works at home. Yeah, bro that well tough back without the internet in those days.

But anyway, so let's get to your report as part of the kind of research you do about your your Community Learning Community. You just issued. 8 million users of the companies online learning platform and love to hear sort of what the trends are for 2023.

What's maybe what you're surprised to see maybe what you expected to see? well, the big surprise is something that didn't really even make it into the report. I'm pretty sure that I added a brief mention at the end.

Actually. I'm sure I did a brief mention at the end but chat GPT came on to the scene when we were when I was in the process of writing it up, one of the things that I say in the introduction is the report is based almost entirely on the actual use of media that we have on our platform and if there's no media people can't view it. So chat GPT gets like a zero because it came up so quickly that there wasn't time to develop any content for people to see but obviously that's been That's been a huge change.

That's a problem on the platform that we're trying. You know, we're we're working very hard at fixing the content Gap there. Obviously as is everyone else and we're really interested in seeing.

We're really interested in seeing where that goes. I mean one. Obvious big change is that if you remember back to the beginning of last year people were actually talking about is they're going to be another AI winter AI seems sort of stale and all of a sudden.

All of a sudden I'm reading, you know every day about new startups that are doing work on large language models news chart-ups that are working on top of chat GPT and you know openai just announced. Their public apis within the last couple of days. Microsoft and my Microsoft and meta have both announced really interesting looking new.

A new large language models. So all of a sudden this field that was saying I don't know maybe we're going to run out of money and there's going to be another winters like, you know, the only show in town which are like a you know with a and I've been working on AI since the eighties actually that's good things but you the it seems like machine learning really kind of brought it up to the bubble and that that Resurgence of a interest in AI but like you said it kind of what seemed like the newness or the hotness of that topic was a nearly what we've been Resurgence through generative Ai, and now also a lot of talk about NLP and image processing and new languages new models Etc building up enlarging the model that that are driving things like generative AI it's amazing how that like said three months ago. We were barely talking about this and now it's everything.

Yeah. Yeah three months ago. I suppose it wasn't Early Fair the you know stable diffusion in the and you know, I'm blanking on the name, but you know the mid journey and the other generative art things.

We're sort of private. We're sort of priming the pump and got people thinking. Yeah, there's something there's something here.

That's really uncanny. You know now we actually have I mean I think this is fascinating. for a company like ours, it's both a For a company like ours, it's both an incredible opportunity and and maybe an incredible threat.

We have people like Matt Wells who was one of our earliest authors. He wrote a book online. It's back in the 90s when he was when he was a grad student.

ai and he recently gave a gave a speech for the ACM where he said computer science is over. A computer, you know Pro, you know programming is over programming is a bad idea programming hasn't changed programming hasn't changed in meaningful ways since since the 60s and I remember actually there's a brilliant little piece by Alan Kay on quora. Which basically says the problem with programming is like this is is the shoemaker's children have the worst choose, you know, we make great tools for everybody else, but our own tools that we use are horrible.

and so Matt is saying that his startup wants to you know wants to re-envision programming to where you know. The engine the the engineers write the specification iron out the specific specification figure out how to test it. And the code is all written by the code is already written by some more much more advanced version of chat GPT or co-pilot or what have you that hurt similar discussions too just building off the embedded base or existing base of Open Source Code and other sources.

I agree with you. I agree with that statement to a degree because you jump into whatever modern language python is what I use a lot today and it's still a lot of housekeeping a lot of stuff that I'm like cheese. Do we still have to do all this stuff but we can make that easier.

Hopefully we're gonna make it easier. Yeah. I mean I do I do a lot of programming in Python these days too and it's like Some of what I like some of it is a whole lot better than in college.

Actually. The college I went to is rather weird. They taught everybody PL 1 but I was programming in basic and some other, you know, actually Assembly Language when I was in high school, but it's like You go to Python and you're editing an emacs or whatever and you're still you know, you're still.

You know writing virtual Punch Cards. Yeah setting up classes setting up, you know connections to whatever apis build bringing in packages all you know other anyway, it is still a lot of the same things. Just been a new form.

Yeah, you kind of wonder why do we keep doing that to ourselves with so I want to make sure we get to the report what in the report was interesting to you that either you know, we're stand out is what people are in today beyond the generative Ai and maybe any any other surprises in the report? Um, but one surprise once once surprise was that the use of content about the major clouds of cloud providers was down. and that's actually for me.

That's a real puzzle. You know, why is it why is it down people have talked about Cloud repatriation. But if you look at the cloud providers, they actually make it pretty difficult to get your stuff out.

So my guess is that if people are actually trying to get themselves out of You know AWS or Google cloud or azure. They're going to be hitting the books. They're going to be coming out of our platform to say, you know coming to our platform to say, you know, how do we do it?

They haven't made this easy. So I don't think that's I don't think that's the reason I do think that there is You know despite despite having despite having written reports about surveys that we did that where almost everybody says that their company is using the cloud I've always had the sneaking suspicion that we were still at the beginning of adoption And I think we're at maybe the 20 to 25% where people are comfortable with it and they don't say, okay. I need a course on AWS quite so much.

Content about Cloud architecture and more General Cloud issues was starting to come to the fore. And I also think that people are realizing that. There aren't any pure Cloud architectures, you know, everything is you know, every everything is going to be multi-cloud hybrid Cloud, whatever you want to call it.

I mean that's that's unavoidable. You know, you're you know you it consider around and say okay. We're totally committed to AWS.

and then a year later, there's going to be a merger or an acquisition and they're in Azure and what are you going to do you're going to Spend a few million dollars moving all that software to AWS for no other reason than to say now. It's all in one place. Yeah, those Cycles before usually doesn't happen.

This is really good economics for doing it. Yeah that yeah, that's not gonna happen. So that was that was a puzzle.

one thing you know to two things from you know, the tiny the tiny bars at the bottom of the charts that I thought were really interesting. We started the you know, we started the year with everybody getting excited about the metaverse and that gradually died off. but there was a really big increase in the use of content about virtual and augmented reality, you know 85% year over year.

And I've always thought. Well first, I don't think the metaverse story is over. I think it's been phrased poorly.

I think the last thing that people want is what Zuckerberg and Microsoft Executives have been talking about which is better meetings. You know, we don't want better meetings. We want fewer meetings, but we do want better tools to collaborate.

And I do think that I do think that virtual reality and augmented reality may have a role to play there. I'm I'm sort I'm sort of waiting my gut feeling is that we have to get Beyond. We have to get the beyond beyond the stage where where to do virtual reality.

You have to put on a set of goggles that make you look like a Martian. Um, and that's what I wonder about are we really going to a future where UI and our kids or whoever friends are sitting around all with our goggles on not interacting with each other in the real world. But only in virtual world, it takes you so out of the world you're in into another place and gaming and things like that do that partially but I don't know that seems like a pretty sterile, you know, we're all gonna go virtual and suddenly the real world doesn't matter anymore.

It does it does seem it does seem like a sterile world to me and what I would watch is what are the, you know, I mean the executives from Niantic who you know the Yeah, the Pokemon the Pokemon go people. Um Have been saying that they want to build, you know, they want to build a world of VR and AR that actually gets you outside and doing stuff and there's a few other people who are doing that. I think that I that I think is that I think is important.

I great things like adreno. And here's the here's an AR through your phone. You can see what the electrons are doing is a flowing through the circuit board them right or you put together.

That's awesome. That's a great use of yeah AR type experience. Yeah, the other the other the other thing is that I I think to make AR cool and approachable well, you know Apple has their glass, you know, Apple has their glasses project which in some ways doesn't seem like it goes all that far beyond what Google did a decade ago, but at the other hand if there's one company on Earth That has the ability to take something like that and make it.

make it a cool fashion accessory that everybody has to have it's a it's apple and You know if we want to look at Broad scale adoption, that's you know, that's the gating factor that I'm looking at. Hmm the other thing the other thing again of small bar at the bottom. uh and in a different completely context we saw about a 75% growth in the use of content about by a about webassembly and that is fascinating.

I mean webassembly is a technology that I mean, you know, I I'll lay my cards in the table. I've always been sort of a JavaScript hater, even though once I wrote an article that said, you know hater or not. JavaScript is going to be you know is going to be the one language that rules the world I call JavaScript the duct tape of our languages, you know, it just kind of the handy tool used everywhere whatever but I I do think webassembly.

webassembly has an interesting chance of getting beyond that and some people have been doing some amazing things that are You know. been doing some amazing things like run like Oh, I was talking to some people at some people from Berkeley about how they teach their, you know, data. Well data 100 in particular not the famous data eight, which is the one that everybody's required to take, but I asked them.

How do you keep your students from you know, you know from you know, mining Bitcoin on Berkeley's Computing resources and they said that's not an issue because we use an Implement implementation of jupyter notebooks that is written on top of webassembly and that runs in the browser so they can mine all the Bitcoin they want all they're doing is heating up their laptop. It's not touching our servers at all and it's like, you know, that's brilliant. and I think that's I've example I mean with assembly at least one things we talked about it a lot is Edge applications Computing and you know your notebook running website like you do bit my Bitcoin money good example of that.

I mean nothing not that that's the only place it could be used but it's often sight. It is a use case. Yeah, and I I and and something like that gets us something like that gets us Beyond.

Webassembly is good because it'll let people use you know. more polite languages like Python and rust and go I mean another, you know, another thing more from the middle of the graphs is that Ruston Rustin and go are both growing fairly significantly. We probably watched that a little bit too much.

because maybe the programming languages aren't as important anymore, but it's Java and put you know Java and python are sort of the gold gold standard for a lot the gold standard for programming languages, but go and rust or growing at about 20% a year and you don't have to do that for many years before you're but before you're on the top of the Heap. I mean, I forget whose survey it was actually I think it was stack overflows that said that rust was the most loved programming language out there and someone else someone else said that Oh, this is a bastardization of the quote. But basically, you know.

Yeah, everybody. Hey, everybody hates the programming languages that they absolutely have to use that. They absolutely have to use to use so we always want something better.

We always want something better, but Rust and go are coming on strong. That's great to hear that. I mean, it's it seems like a parallels with more cloud-native Cloud builds applications obviously with go and And with Google and there are a lot of lot of rust fans that I run into really like that language a lot.

But it's there. There are a lot of rest fans and memory safety is a big deal. I mean that's something I've been asked to write about and I'm a little bit scared because I don't know enough about it, but but it is a big deal.

I mean there was some study that's like, you know, yeah, that's Oh, I think I think the number was 85 85% but people shouldn't quote me on that but 85% of all. Software vulnerabilities have something to do with have something to do with memory safety. Well, certainly buffer overflows and things like that.

Push those boundaries. We've been having memory safety issues since the mainframes and the P11. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, I mean, I remember I remember them. I remember the Morris worm and that was And that was that that that is your classic memory Safety Book. Mmm, that's going like always too.

Yeah. Well this has been great really appreciate the opportunity to talk for you Mike and thanks for doing the work that you do. It's both.

You know O'Reilly's been with us in a programming Community and Technical Community for for a long time. And yeah, it's a resource that I use heavily as well. And so I appreciate the content and also really enjoyed the research that you do about what's happening with that contact, you know where it's headed.

So we'll put a link into the description. So folks can go find this report and probably other resources as well. Just a part and thought anything you want to add to it before we wrap up.

Well, thanks. Thanks for the opportunity. This has been this has been fun.

Writing the report was a lot of work but in the end, I'm glad it made it out. And I'm glad it's I'm glad it's being useful and you know, it's one of these things it's one of those projects that's you. Look at you you look back on it and and In retrospect, it was a lot more fun to do than it was when you were in the middle of it.

Yeah labor of love. I think they call those things like yeah. Okay.

It was it was all tough getting through but man I really like the end product. So yeah, I I yeah, I'm I'm I think I think we I think we had had a number of good stories and that we talked and and that we did a good job of telling them. So yeah.

Fantastic. Well, we'll put the link into the description. Thank you.

Again Mike Ludacris who is VP of Technology content and with O'Reilly media and what have you back again? Mike? Would you want some animals and things too?

Okay, really? I really enjoy our conversation as well. Okay.

Well, thanks enjoyed being here.