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**Jerod Santo:** Specifically Perl... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, it's high time. It's high time. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's high time, yeah. |
**Bert Hubert:** And for myself, I also sort of -- I'm a bit ambivalent about this, because on one hand I love the new things, and I think everyone should be... So I do a lot of JavaScript, for example, but I've also been doing C++ since like 30 years... And you could on the one hand say that C++ is starting to get old... |
If you would take a look at the technical development over like 20 or 30 years, how you look at new things really determines if you're going to be in technology for the long haul, and continue to be relevant and effective, or if you have to bow out and become some kind of manager, because you're no longer with it. And ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:08:17.11\] Yeah, we're certainly in a career where you can't just learn everything you need to know at university and be done. I mean, if you're not interested in change and adaptation and learning new technologies, this isn't really the space for you. You're not going to last. |
**Bert Hubert:** No. But it turns out there are many employers that actually also do not believe in change... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Bert Hubert:** So you can end up in some kind of insurance place, or a government tax agency and work with 25-year-old technology. |
**Jerod Santo:** Writing COBOL on a mainframe... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, they're still rocking it over there. So it's not necessarily -- you could come at a point in your life where you say, "Look, I don't need all these new things anymore, and I have only so many years left in my career, and I'm going to spend them in a basement, in some kind of insurance place." So ... |
**Jerod Santo:** So how many languages have you invested in, seriously? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, so this is a terrible story... So I'm terrible at Python. So I write a lot of Python, and mostly for making graphs in Matplotlib and Jupyter... But my Python is really terrible, and it has been terrible for the past 20 years, because I've never written anything. I only write scripts in Python, an... |
**Jerod Santo:** That was a good call. |
**Bert Hubert:** That was a good call. I probably just got lucky at that time. So JavaScript, I'm sort of reasonably proficient in. And in C++, that's a weird thing... That's my workhorse. And the thing is, I use like 20% of C++. Because over the years, I've learned there is a good core in C++, that's like a really sol... |
\[01:11:46.06\] And lately, I've had to admit that I'm sort of skilled at HTML now, which I never saw coming... Apparently, I got a little bit of that going. But that's really it. I got my start with Perl, which was also sort of -- I've found that people sort of didn't take Perl seriously, and I also did not take Perl ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Bert Hubert:** SQLite will not disappoint you on that front. |
**Jerod Santo:** So how do you see promising technology coming? |
**Bert Hubert:** I've actually been sort of not that happy with the tech. For example, programming languages. If you look at the development of programming languages, you see that in the past years, we've not gotten closer to the ideal programming language. So there is something wrong with every programming language ri... |
And one thing that I have a serious -- yeah, one thing I would love to build... If you look at any kind of software, it involves interactions. So you have to do things with the software, and you might have to sign up for a website, and then you get assets that are yours, and you can configure these assets... And that i... |
And I would love one day for someone to develop this higher-level way of interaction developing... And I'm sure that it has been done in some places, but I would love to have this as infrastructure, so that no one has to write a transition handler anymore that decides if you filled in the right zip code, or whatever. I... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:15:56.15\] I do see it happening at the super-high level, almost no code... If you look at like form builders, which we give to people, and they can put in their conditionals, and they can say "Give me a zip code widget, and put it on the screen..." But you know that that's like... Not ad hoc. Wha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Bespoke. |
**Bert Hubert:** Bespoke, yeah. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, bespoke. Just the one thing. So I also do presentations, and you can hire me as a speaker, and my speaker agency wrote a whole low-code solution system just to do the logistics of that. And it's sort of wonderful in a way, because I'm really impressed that they managed to build that mostly themse... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it's hard to resist the future, really. Like, you've said, you've got to pay attention to it, but not so much that you're like engulfed by it. You have to weigh it against what you know, where you've been, and where it may go... And hopefully, the wisdom you've gained gives you the ability to ... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. So in this talk on dealing with change, I also mentioned AI. And then a part of the audience goes like "Yeah, AI! I want to do everything with AI." And part of the audience goes "No, it's unethical, it's bad, it's not as good, it's not reliable..." And of course, it's tricky to find the middle gr... |
And then, of course, there are things where we still have to worry, "Yeah, what good is a model that just hallucinates stuff?" and we could find that really bad. But it is extremely tricky for people right now to understand that "Look, we could do some wonderful things with AI." It really could be good, even though the... |
**Jerod Santo:** Get out of here, AI chatbots... We've had enough of you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, well... I think that this decision tree that you've got listed - which is rudimentary; it's not fully featured in terms of every possible way you would decide against choosing a dependency in this post... I think that's a great example of where you'd throw AI at it, or automation, let's just s... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:20:02.10\] You know, does a tech look good? I mean, maybe that would be a great example of throwing AI at it. It can do an analysis of a codebase and say "Well, what does good look like?" And then the model obviously depicts some of that stuff. Who writes it? That's a pretty easy one to just au... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, I have to admit, I had not thought of that yet... But people did mention it. They said, "Look, I have 1,600 dependencies, and I'm going to make the AI look at them." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Bert Hubert:** It's not necessarily the worst thing to do, because the AI might in fact very well just figure out that "Look, this is just wrong", or "This code is already in North Korea." |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Bert Hubert:** So yeah, it's actually -- as a layer, it is probably an interesting thing to do. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I mean, if you've got that many dependencies, it's literally impossible to investigate your own dependency tree. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's better than nothing. It's one of those "What have you got to lose, besides maybe a few cents?" Well, Bert, what else? Anything else you have on your mind that we haven't talked about yet? |
**Bert Hubert:** No, no, I think we touched on the -- yeah, we've spoken a lot about dependencies, of course... |
**Jerod Santo:** Of course. |
**Bert Hubert:** And yeah, the thing I keep harping on about, about how do you select the new things that you, that you don't like? That's something that I would really recommend people to spend a bit more time on, because it's really strange... If you look at how we choose what technology to use, it's actually quite o... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good point. I think we do tend to overvalue social proof - you know, what everybody else is doing - and undervalue our own ability to dig in and make a decision based on what we find. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, one of the things I stressed in my talk also on selecting these technologies - you can use your coworkers or the people that work with you on the project, and just tell people "Look, I'm gonna present on this new thing. I've found this new magical database, and it does 300 million lookups per sec... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Bert Hubert:** \[01:22:46.23\] Or you might find, because you actually have to get down with it, to actually make the graphs to present to your coworkers, that you find that the graphs are actually not that great. So in this way, you can both entertain the people around you with your findings, and also use them as a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** If you do any of those things, I would recommend going to Changelog.com/community. That's a good place to hang. Share your findings there, share your thoughts there... There's a thriving Zulip there, waiting for you to thread, and be a part of... And it's free, too. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Bert, what's the best place for folks to connect with you on the internet? |
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