Speaker Topics - No Fluff Just Stuff
NFJS2025

Modern Software : Hardware

Our industry never stops changing, but sometimes those changes are trivia and fluffy. Sometimes they are fundamental and enduring. This series is going to highlight some of the most important trends happening in the hardware, software, data and architecture spaces.

It is a common perspective that you do not need to know how a car works to drive it. For much of the recent history of our industry that has been true for the software we develop and the hardware that it runs on. For most people this has mean compiled software targeting a particular platform with a particular general purpose CPU reflecting a Von Neumann Architecture. As the worlds of Moore's Law and machine learning combine with explosive data growth and cloud, edge, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) computing environments, hardware has never been more important to software developers to help them do what they need to do in the fastest, cheapest, low-power consumption and low-latency ways. We will discuss the myriad computational environments that are increasingly important to us and how to target them with our software artifacts.

To be a good Modern Software Developer, you are going to need to know more about hardware.

We will cover:

  • The changing deployment architectures for software systems
  • Moore's Law: The Past
  • Moore's Law: The Future
  • Multi-core systems
  • Popular ISAs: x86, ARM, RISC-V
  • Modern Computer Architectures
  • Alternate devices such as: GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, TPUs
  • Emerging calls for IT Sovereignty
  • Compiler-oriented strategies for managing these differences

Brian Sletten

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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