Algorithmic bias, blockchain, coding challenges and local hacking came under the spotlight at the second instalment of DevConf. These topics were presented to South Africa’s developer community in a one-day conference and exhibition held at Vodacom World in Midrand on 9 March 2017.
The conference had speakers across five tracks and US-based associate product manager at Twitter, Terri Burns (pictured), gave the keynote address.
Burns’ talk “Bad people, bad computers” circled specifically around algorithmic bias which can indirectly and unintentionally allow machines to learn prejudiced behaviour. Her key message to developers was to make them more aware of their bias, so what ends up happening is that developers can have oversights that result in people perceiving the people building the technology to be “bad”. Developers need to reassess how they contribute to this situation and how they can build for a future that will be stronger and more cohesive. Developers need to be cognisant of implicit bias, and how it manifests in code. In other words, “check your privilege”, she noted.
For example, she said a programmer might add parameters for software that calls on people to pay $5 to play a game or add their college details in order to complete a form, but for many people $5 could prove prohibitively expensive, or they may not have attended college. These might seem to be reasonable things to ask, but she encouraged developers to be conscious of the communities that get isolated when software is developed.
The conference brought together developers to help them keep abreast of all the changes taking place. Pieter Kruger, BU head of Software Development and Integration at EOH, said that it is crucial for developers to spend time with like-minded people that are driven by their passion and to remind them that software development is a creative endeavour and mostly fun.
The conference provided software developers with tools, practices and principles applicable to tackling current and future anticipated challenges in the local software development environment.
One of the talks, by Badi Sudhakaran of IQ Business, titled “Introducing Blockchain to web developers”, gave the audience a run-down of what blockchain is. He said that blockchain will cause a revolution similar to the one enabled by the advent of the internet. Sudhakaran explained blockchain to developers who primarily build web and mobile apps.
Sponsors for the event included EOH, BBD Software Development, Derivco, DVT, ABSA, Microsoft, Allan Gray, Amazon web services, Atlassian, Google, OfferZen, Britehouse, Chillisoft, IQ Business, Micro Focus and Suse.
