It was back in just 2019 that our leaders were telling coal miners to “learn to code” and software programming was considered an educational panacea that would employ vast swaths of future generations. These statements were all made under a static assumption that the means, methods and mettle for developing, deploying and maintaining software would not fundamentally change — at least not so much as to be nearly unrecognizable.

Fast forward to 2024, and some are now saying that AI is going to eliminate (or nearly eliminate) the need for any software developers at all. That’s quite the swing in sentiment in just five years.

Still, the landscape of software development has undeniably altered in the last few years. See, this chart:

We have basically erased all gains made since 2010, which begs the question: was the past decade (or more) just a zero-interest rate phenomenon with a pandemic chaser?

No matter the answer, one thing now seems obvious: such a large change in sentiment belies an enormous green space of opportunity for innovation around how we create, deploy and maintain software.

In that context, two things seem rather obvious to me (you may disagree):

The advent of AI has already changed software forever, and the pace of this change is showing no signs of slowing down.
We’re not getting rid of developers (even if that means that we may have less of them, or that their roles may be different).

We have entered a tension field that stands between the innovations that the broad movement of cloud computing brought and the new formations, ripples and disruptions that AI creates on a near-daily basis.

The purpose of SW2con is to wade into this tension, and begin to ask (and, where we can, answer) the hard questions that will impact developer career arcs, enterprise software projects (both legacy and forward looking), open source software projects, and the very process of software creation and deployment. To do that, SW2con will dive into topics that span the horizon of new developments around cloud and cloud-native software projects (APIs, Observability and Monitoring, WASM, Serverless, DevOps, DevSecOps, etc), while diving into all things AI that are related to software (co-pilots, RAG, agents, databases, multimodal RAG and LLMs, synthetic data, open source projects, infrastructure, etc).

It’s a broad expanse of topics — one that we’ll tighten and refine in the coming months leading up the opening keynote.

What I’m aiming to do is have an agenda that combines the use-case/in the trenches projects with things that are truly forward looking. To that end, I think there are three buckets of talks:

Use Case sessions: It seems that we may have begun to enter the “trough of disillusionment” that accompanies deployments starting, so real things happening on the ground become especially useful. If you’re in production (or nearing production) with something cool and use-casey, I want to see it.
Forward looking sessions: I don’t want to simply have presentations about how AI is automating what already exists. I also want to see forward looking presentations about the tools and technologies that are going to completely upend the process itself (or obliterate it altogether). These talks would include github projects, enterprise initiatives that are way out on the edge, and “I can envision this happening” talks that include a new toolset (think agents, new methods of multi-modal RAG, etc).
Miscellaneous sessions: Lastly, I would love to place a few talks that would fall in a “miscellaneous” bucket. These sessions would include “hard question” talks, career development talks, or even “why aren’t we thinking/talking about X” rants.

So let this serve as the CFP(ish) being open. Bring me your fresh topics — be they technically deep, or philosophically important. I’m still sorting through all of this alongside all of you, so I don’t pretend to be some sort of authority on anything. I’m looking for our agenda to challenge, foster conversations, and leave everyone walking away with a deep conviction that we, as an industry, are going to be the creators of our own futures.

Kim and I cannot wait to see all of you at SW2con 2025!

The Tension Field: A CFP for SW2con