Development

[Boston — May 2023] — “It’s a law that any conversation around technology has to come back to AI within five minutes.”

Well put, Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO for real-time streaming juggernaut Confluent. Speaking at J.P. Morgan’s Boston Tech Investor event, Kreps knew this was coming. ChatGPT rules the news these days.

Given the daily pounding of 1,000 reporters’ laptops, given Nvidia’s vault into the highest clouds of valuation, it is no surprise that ChatGPT generative AI is the recurring topic. It will impede all other discussion, just as expected by tech stalwarts at J.P. Morgan’s and others’ tech events.

It’s the 600-lb. ChatBot in the room, and it is bigger than big.

Confluent chief on Chatbot interaction

Back in the nascent days of social media, the founders of Confluent, then working at LinkedIn, created a distributed commit log that stored streams of records. They called it Kafka and grew it out into a fuller data stream processing system. It’s intent is to bring to the broader enterprise real-time messaging capabilities akin to that of the Flash Boys of Wall Street.

The company is still in “spend a buck to make a buck” mode. For the quarter ending March 31, Confluent revenues increased 38% to $174.3M, while net jumped 35% to $152.6M. Customers include Dominos, Humana, Lowes, Michelin and others. In January it purchased would-be competitor, Immerok, a leading contributor to the Apache Flink stream processing project.

What’s the significance of real-time streaming in “the age of AI,” Kreps is asked at the Boston event. He says:

It’s really about how a company can take something like a large language model that has a very general model of the world and combine it with information about that company, and about customers, and be able to put those things together to do something for the business.

He gives an example: A large travel company wants to have an interactive chatbot for customers. Seems the barrier ChatGPT faces there for improvements is not so high. As Kreps said: “The chatbots were always pretty bad. It’s like interacting with like the stupidest person that you’ve ever talked to.”

Improvements needed for chatbots include a real-time view of all the information the company holds about customers and operations.

What do you need to make that work? Well, you need to have the real-time view of all the information about them, their flights, their bookings, their hotel, are they going to make their connection, etcetera. And you need a large language model which can take that information and answer arbitrary questions that the customer might ask. So the architecture for them is actually very simple. They need to put together this real time view of their customers, what’s happening, where the flights are, what’s delayed what’s going on. And then they need to be able to call out to a service for the generative AI stuff, feed it this data, feed it the questions from customers, and … integrate that into their service, which is very significant. This is a whole new way of interacting with their customers. And I think that that pattern is very generalizable.

Popping the question: Dorsey

For Jack Dorsey, the question “What about ChatGTP?” is raw meat. He melded SMS and the Web to create Twitter, and now with a nod to bitcoin and block chain has built Block, nee Square. The financial services and digital payments company posted revenue results for the three months ended April 1 that increased 26% to $4.99B, while net loss decreased a significant 92% to $16.8M. The good news was based on increased use of its Cash App product.

At the J.P. Morgan tech investor conference, Dorsey told the people, while hype obviously abounds, true progress rides on use cases.

There’s a ton of hype right now. And I think there’s a lot of companies being started that are going to fail because of that hype. I think the technology industry is very trendy, and very fashionable and jumps from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next. It wasn’t so long ago that we were only talking about Bored Apes and Crypto and NFTs and now we’re talking only about AI and how it’s going to kill us.

There’s always some truth in all these things. I just would caution any company that’s approaching it from a technology perspective, [to] instead use a use case perspective. What is the use case you’re trying to solve? And what technologies can you use to solve it more creatively?

THAT’S THE WAY IT IS — Clearly, panelists and podiumists are preparing to take on ChatGPT questions. At the same time, the clamor of the now will shift to prioritizing generative AI strategically within a host of technology initiatives. ChatGPT may be generalizable — but the proof will not appear overnight. The proof is in the business use case.

[Dec 20, 2022] – Noting here the passing at 91 last month of Frederick Brooks, director of some of IBM’s most important mainframe-era programming projects. He was a key figure in establishing the idea that software projects should be intelligently engineered and organized.

He helped as much as anyone to move the mysterious art of tinkering with computer code toward a profession capable of repeatable results. “The Mythical Man-Month,” his 1975 distillation of years of development management, became a common reference work in many a developer’s desk library.

Working at IBM in the 1950s and 1960s, and spearheading development of the vaunted IBM/360, Brooks gave a lie to notions that were bedrock in hardware-software projects, and came up with a few notable inventions as well.

Especially, he is credited with IBM’s decision to settle on an eight-bit byte. This allowed the systems to handle both text and numerals. Strange to think there was a time when machines were dedicated either to text handling or numerical calculation, but it was so!

He oversaw the development of systems that could be offered with an expandable range of processor and memory equipment at different price points, thus entering the development era of “platform” over “product.”

Brooks studied and found some surprising truths about complex software and projects – the most telling: That projects slow down at a greater rate when leaders add people as a project gets closer to completion.

He also saw the dangerous lure technology offers in the form of “The Silver Bullet” that promises a sudden tech- or organizational-style breakthrough.

With these and other observations, Brooks help build a philosophical underpinning for structured analysis, a school of thinking that held sway for software during an era of big projects marked especially by NASA’s Apollo program.

Ed Yourdon, Ivar Jacobsen, Tom DeMarco and others would take Brooks’ work into the 1990s. Like him, they realized it’s not just about “the code” – that the culture of the organization can play a more dominant role.

Brooks paved the path forward with emphasis on requirements gathering. But he foresaw the tarpit that beckoned with any search for the greatest schema perfection ahead of actually getting the project going.

He conveyed this without embracing the extreme that says “Fail Fast,” and he did it as always with a measure of humor. It’s right there in the title for one of “The Mythical Man-Month” chapters: “Plan to Throw One Away.”

Some of Brooks’ musings do echo another era. I don’t think we have Man Months anymore – mythical or other. Unquestionably too, team programmers have gained much more responsibility over the years, so Brooks’ emphasis on the manager wears thin [Heck, a whole era of development sprang from gritty JavaScript developers who found a way around obstacles their managers took for granted as their ‘lot in life.’]

But managers, at the end of the day, bear the greatest responsibility for the software project. Technology acumen is just a table stake. Their communications and organization skills must be stellar, as Brooks indicates when he writes:

The Tower of Babel was perhaps the first engineering fiasco, but it was not the last. Communication and its consequent, organization, are critical for success. The techniques of communication and organization demand from the manager much thought and as much experienced confidence as the software technology itself. – From The Mythical Man-Month.

Is software engineering really a profession? The question will continue to be asked, and Brooks work will likely ever be part of that discussion.

Coda: My days as a software project manager were brief – about a year. [After which my colleagues welcomed me back to editorial and told me they thought I’d been crazy ever to leave.] What I learned building web sites was that, no matter what you think your problem is, it is probably a project management problem. I owe that to Brooks. As expressed in his thoughtful and very often bemused writings, Brooks’ thinking on the topic informed my and many others’ efforts to ‘ship the darn thing’. – Jack Vaughan, 2022

Kreps, Dorsey, riff on ChatGPT

“Mythical Man-Month” Author Frederick Brooks, at 91