Hadley Wickham @ Cal Poly

The one and only Hadley Wickham is coming to Cal Poly on March 30th, to give a talk and Q&A session, as part of the Noyce School of Applied Computing Distinguished Speaker Series.

This event is open to members of the community as well, so I am cross-posting this as a Central Coast R Users event. I hope some of you are able to make it!

Depending on numbers and timing, we may even be able to get some time with Hadley as a Meetup - so please RSVP here if you plan to come so I can be in touch!

---

Talk description:

Y code when AI?

Software engineering has irrevocably changed, and there is now relatively little need to personally type code. But I don't think this means you should no longer learn to code. In fact, it's now a better time to learn than ever before. Coding agents might have changed how we create code, but code as an artifact of reasoning and reproducibility is still incredibly valuable.

I'll share what I've learned using AI tools in my own software engineering practice, particularly the importance of the "double-entry accounting" of programming—unit tests—and the importance of creating an adversarial environment for code generation. I'll also include some speculation about how AI will affect data science. It's less clear to me how this is going to play out, since it's much harder to automatically validate the most important parts of data science.

This is a scary time, but it's also exhilarating. I built an iPhone app in a couple of hours without ever having written Swift. The ceiling on what individuals can build has never been higher, and it's easier than ever to bring your imagination to life.

---

Parking Information

To park on campus as a guest, you must pre-purchase a parking pass here: https://www.offstreet.io/events/7QNP962Q