Started as a side project with friends, WeAreDevelopers (WAD) was initially more of a hobby for CEO & co-founder Sead Ahmetovic. Today’s WAD World Congress aims to close the gap between developers and decision-makers. It promotes a broad community that can network and exchange ideas regardless of the tech stack, programming language, or developer tools used.

A framework for tech

David Simas (pictured above) kicked things off in the opening keynote. The Managing Director of Research & Impact at Emerson Collective, former White House Political Director and then CEO of the Obama Foundation, spoke about "civic coding" and a "framework for democratic tech". He underlined that developers influence companies, societies, countries, and the whole world like never before. Awareness of one's rights and responsibilities is crucial: “Remember who you are and who you represent,” he urged the audience. “Technology has triggered epic changes,” David went on to explain, such as:

• The disruption of economies and destruction of affluence, especially that of the middle class.

• The transformation of culture and demographics, increasing differences between people.

• The accumulation of knowledge and the need to determine truth from fiction.

In his proposed framework for tech, David identified three aspects of leadership for developers to embrace:

1. Leadership of self—awareness of ego, vanity, and pride, and personal biases and triggers.

2. Leadership of others—endorsing diversity and the perspectives of others, managing disagreements, and fostering openness in thought.

3. Leadership to serve—achieving and striving for your goals while noting interdependencies and serving citizenship and solidarity.

To give our European readers a little more context: As in the EU, the pros and cons, as well as the how much, of Big Tech regulation are heatedly debated in the US. While 60% of Democrats say major tech companies should be regulated more, a slim majority of 55% of Republicans are against more regulation, even though the difference between the two parties (in this regard) is narrowing (Source: PEW Research Center, "Americans' Views of Technology Companies" survey, February 2024). Unlike in the EU, regulation is discussed here less with a consumer protection perspective and more in context of the conflict between the (regulatory) freedom of speech versus the protection of personal rights (including personal identity). In other words, how much does a free society, but also every individual, have to tolerate and endure from other (co-)users on omnipresent social media platforms? And to what extent should the lawmakers be allowed to step in and regulate social media platforms in order to protect users from each other? Given this background, of course, the question arises as to what "democratic tech" in the sense of David Simas is actually supposed to mean.

We think that democracies and their governments are generally well advised to exercise restraint when it comes to state coercion. Free private platform providers, on the other hand, are in our view (more) free to apply stricter standards to their user community than mere compliance with the criminal liability threshold. This applies at least as long as they do not violate any laws themselves, do not discriminate against anyone—and as long as they do not have a monopoly (and therefore sovereign-like) position. In general, we prefer not to let politicians, lawmakers or governments decide which technology, which (free and legal) opinion or which company should prevail, but to simply let the power of the market (and the better argument) take effect.

Developers' usage of AI

Rajeev Rajan, CTO at Atlassian, also took the WAD main stage. His thesis? Generative AI is already increasing developer joy. “When developer joy suffers, so does innovation,” Rajeev stated. “But developer joy isn’t just something to be measured in qualitative terms, like a 10x increase in experimentation and a measure of productivity. It’s more than that; it’s the flow of creativity.”

Rajeev believes that AI will make developers more productive by functioning as an assistant with humans in control. He addressed what he sees as the three major obstacles to developer joy and where AI can have a huge impact:

• Tech debt—imagine giving an entire source code report to AI to scan. Why not ask it to find a common set of problems and automatically fix them at the push of a button?

• Insufficient documentation—Gen AI’s search functionality is improving at pace. Why shouldn’t it allow developers to quickly search across all apps and formats for documentation?

• A lack of time for deep work—incidents or noise pull developers away from the work they’re doing. What if AI could group similar alerts, detect patterns, and find the root cause automatically?

Rajeev finished his talk by asking the audience to think about how to drive change and mitigate the effects. “It’s up to us to change the future,” he declared. “AI has the potential to supercharge developers, supercharge humans, and enable us.”

In fact, since the days of early computing in the 1940s, software and technology have created value by serving us ever more and even better. Increased developer productivity is the more, and the results of our creativity is the better. Of course, the two elements here in parts depend on and influence each other. Thus, every better tooling, every programming language, every IDE, and every framework that has helped us as developers to develop more & better software has ultimately improved our ability to create more value for others through our ideas, creativity, and craftsmanship. We expect nothing less (but also nothing more) from AI.

Future of the Internet

Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, in his talk, compared what he called the “new super cycle” of AI with previous watershed moments such as personal computing in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, mobile computing in the 2000s and cloud computing in the 2010s. Meanwhile, he thinks the 2020s will be remembered as the decade of AI.

The year 2023 was, according to Prashanth, especially notable: a year of change catalyzed by the arrival of ChatGPT and other LLMs. He then went on to outline how Stack Overflow’s partnerships with providers such as Google Cloud and OpenAI are intended to keep improving OverflowAI, a natural language search tool for questions on coding and software engineering. The company’s long-term vision for software engineers is that they will never have to leave their IDE while coding—because ultimately, he says, that’s where this is all going: To keep you in your flow.

Prashanth also gave a preview of the Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey. Every year, the survey delivers insights into the global developer community. As in the previous year, much of the focus was on AI. Before concerns are raised against the alleged hype, we would like to point to this year's key findings: Because 63.2% of all professional developers said that they are already using AI in their software development processes—another 13.5% plan to do so soon. 81% of all respondents stated that AI increases their productivity and identified this as the greatest benefit of AI tools for developers.

We therefore think: AI is by no means just a hype, rather the "hype" has long since found its way into professional software development—and the day-to-day work of developers. Certainly there is more to come in the not-too-distant future. We are looking forward to it!

Share your thoughts with us

These are our takeaways from the WAD World Congress 2024 in Berlin. Discover what we’re up to next or share your WAD conference takeaways with us on LinkedIn.

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