Speaker Series
The Noyce School of Applied Computing Speaker Series brings leading professionals from across industry, academia and government to Cal Poly to share insights on emerging technologies, real-world challenges and the future of applied computing. Each talk gives students an opportunity to learn directly from experts shaping the field, explore new perspectives and engage in conversations that connect classroom learning with industry innovation. Browse upcoming and past speakers to see who’s joining us next.
upcoming speaker
Hadley Wickham, March 30 – 2:10 PM, ATL
Software engineering has irrevocably changed, and there is now relatively little need to personally type code. But I don’t think this means you should no longer learn to code. In fact, it’s now a better time to learn than ever before. Coding agents might have changed how we create code, but code as an artifact of reasoning and reproducibility is still incredibly valuable.
I’ll share what I’ve learned using AI tools in my own software engineering practice, particularly the importance of the “double-entry accounting” of programming—unit tests—and the importance of creating an adversarial environment for code generation. I’ll also include some speculation about how AI will affect data science. It’s less clear to me how this is going to play out, since it’s much harder to automatically validate the most important parts of data science.
This is a scary time, but it’s also exhilarating. I built an iPhone app in a couple of hours without ever having written Swift. The ceiling on what individuals can build has never been higher, and it’s easier than ever to bring your imagination to life.