Arty Starr

Flow Theory & AI Architecture

I.flow() AI is an emotional intelligence AI that learns to respond in real-time to the pain of humans, for example, developers that are having a hard time. The I.flow() AI Platform is still in the early stages of mapping theory to concrete implementation, so in this talk we'll breakdown architecture strategy, pain metrics, pair programming buddy, supply chain flows, and the underpinning of Flow theory.

Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure

This is my story of lessons learned on how to stop the crushing effects of business pressure… I was team lead with full control of our green-field project. After a year, we had continuous delivery, a beautiful clean code base, and worked directly with our customers to design the features. Then our company split in two, we were moved under different management, and I watched my project get crushed.

As a consultant, I saw the same pattern of relentless business pressure everywhere, driving one project after another into the ground. I made it my mission to help the development teams solve this problem. This is my story of lessons learned on how to transform an organization from the bottom up. I'll show you how to lead the way.

I.flow() Philosophy: Hacking your life with AI

In this session, we'll use I.flow() AI as a metaphorical lens to explore the world of philosophy.
Each one of us is on a journey to discover who we are, why we're here, and what it all means. I.flow() Emotional Intelligence AI evolved as a result of deep self-reflection, in the search for an authentic self, and the courage to live an authentic life.

“I.choose() therefore I.am()”

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

This is my story of lessons learned on why improvement efforts fail… I had a great team. We were disciplined about best practices and spent tons of time on improvements. Then I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn’t ship again for a year.

Despite our best efforts with CI, unit testing, design reviews, and code reviews, we lost our ability to understand the system. We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn’t solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.

Reinventing Organizational Architecture

Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world – the clash of top-down control, money, and economics, versus art, freedom, working with our friends, and bringing awesome creations to life.

Overcoming these challenges in our industry requires a huge paradigm shift – rather than building organizations as money-making machines with top-down control, our organizations need to become thinking, feeling, interconnected social organisms, where our humanity isn't boiled down to a few numbers.

How do we shift the paradigm of the organization, to bridge these two worlds together? The short answer – with the help of software.

Discussion: Generalized AI and the Impact on our Future

Flow AI is an emotional intelligence AI platform based on I.flow() theoretical brain models, and is in the very early stages of being developed as a co-operative community effort. Given the inevitable evolution toward generalized AI, what does this mean for our future?

Discussion: Test Automation Disasters and Lessons Learned

How much time have you spent automating tests, then discovered the tests were mostly useless, brittle, time-consuming, and hard to understand? How many times have you deleted everything, started over, and came with a substantially better strategy for next time?

In this group discussion, we'll dig into one disaster story at a time, explore the nuts & bolts, then distill lessons learned and improvement ideas.

Discussion: Managing Dependencies Across Teams

Software development is hard enough with one team, but coordinating work across multiple teams can be especially challenging. The more brains involved, the more complex the dependencies, the easier it is to make mistakes.

What are the biggest pains you see out in the wild? What types of strategies have you found to work? Come share your stories and lessons learned.

Keynote: The Skyrocketing Costs of Diagnostic Difficulty

With the explosion of new frameworks, a mountain of automation, and our applications distributed across hundreds of services in the cloud, the level of complexity in our industry is growing at an insane pace. With increased complexity comes increased costs and risks. When diagnosing unexpected behavior can take days, weeks, or sometimes months, all while our release is on the line, our projects plunge into chaos. In the invisible world of software development, how do we identify what's causing our pain? How do we escape the chaos?

Keynote: Theory of Emotional Intelligence

With the advancement of AI, the paradigm shift of blockchain, the media war for the Internet, and escalating emotion, it's time to explore brand new territory – using software as a metaphor to construct a functional model of the human mind. Imagine your brain's logic is written in code. You fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint in the “Self” class, and inspect your brain's internal state. What are the state variables? What does the code look like? How do we fix the bugs?

I.flow() is a theory of consciousness that models motivation behavior of humans using software as a metaphor, because… why not? From the origin of gut feel reasoning, to the feedback loops that drive you, we'll breakdown the functional architecture that makes the universe tick.