The Wonderland of Intelligent Software by Dino Esposito

We are proud to announce that Authority Partners will be hosting a two-day event: The Wonderland of Intelligent Software. We will be hosting Dino Esposito, one of the most prominent software architects of our time, at Meeting Point Cinema in Sarajevo, BiH on Friday, January 31 and Saturday, February 1 (2020). Please note that the event is by invitation only.

More About Dino Esposito

In a career spanning 25 years, Dino has authored over 20 books and 1,000+ articles. His monthly column, “Cutting Edge,” has been featured in MSDN Magazine for 22 consecutive years. It is widely recognized that these books and articles have helped thousands of .NET and ASP.NET developers and software architects around the world grow professionally.

Having escaped a dreadful COBOL project, he started out as a C developer in 1992, and since then he has witnessed MFC and ATL, COM and DCOM, the debut of .NET, the rise and fall of Silverlight and the ups and downs of various architectural patterns. Back in 1995, Dino led a team of five dreamers who actually deployed things that we would now call Google Photos and Shuttershock – desktop applications capable of handling photos that are stored virtually (in the “cloud”). At that time, nobody even had a name for these applications. In 2003, Dino wrote about ASP.NET for Microsoft Press, and also authored the best-seller, Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise. His most recent book for Microsoft Press, Introducing Machine Learning (2019), is specific because it was written with his 21-year-old son, Francesco.

Dino has taught a few successful Pluralsight courses on .NET architecture, ASP.NET MVC UI and, more recently, ML.NET. He is the architect behind most of the back office applications that keep professional tennis circuits running, and, for the past two years, he has been focusing on renewable energy, IoT and artificial intelligence while serving as Corporate Digital Strategist at BaxEnergy.

Program

DAY 1 – Kick Off

An inspiring day that will see freeform thoughts on humans and software. The major issue facing software companies (and companies, in general) is not how to motivate developers to do more and to do their best, but how to avoid demotivating them and preventing them from doing exactly what is in their nature. Motivation goes hand in hand with feeling inspired, and the secret to feeling inspired lies in making sense of things so that you know what has happened and which patterns things will follow in the future.

Humans and software can’t be intelligent at the same time and in the same way. The embryo of modern software began to form back in the days of WWII and took root in the years following the war. Then it got a boost, passing through software engineering, artificial intelligence, Visual Basic, Java, the web, mobile services, the cloud and now back to AI, but with fancier name: machine learning.

We’ll take a tour to see where software started, then we’ll come to software engineering and survey the patternitis and architecturitis of the 1990s. People got used to whatever might have been running on a computer, and only when the iPhone came out did, they discover the true essence of user experience. Since then, it’s been quite a run to make software look intelligent. It is a matter of friendliness, a matter of thinking about users and domains, a matter of using smart techniques, such as machine learning and neural networks. The lecture will focus on what “intelligent” means when applied to software. Patterns and design are important, but what if we try to imagine a world of software where they only have a “secondary” level of importance. When we say “the code works,” in the end, that says everything. It’s referring to acceptable performance, sustainable maintenance, bug-free usability, friendliness. Are patterns and architecture really important? Or is that what is all about?

DAY 2 – Things to Know

A “pragmatism” day that will see some challenging examples of cutting-edge technologies being put through their paces. Just because something is talked about a lot doesn’t mean it will do the job the way you need to have it done. It’s about having the courage to look through the lenses of “hype and commodities.” You may well come to the same conclusion provided by hype and commodities, but, at least you’ll be more stable and fixed when it comes to your own position!

There are goods and then there are analogous goods, which can be more expensive. Should you buy a Kia or a BMW? Angular services and microservices are costly. It depends on what you need. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money in order to get the job done. All you have to do is select the right tool for the job. We’ll look at a couple of scenarios: gRPC vs REST and VanillaJS vs Angular. In both cases, we’ll be talking about various tools that can do the same jobs, but only one will be right for a particular task.

This is an event you don’t want to miss, so be sure to save the date!

Agenda