Work Smarter, Not Harder with your AI Coding Companion

Track: Frameworks

Abstract

AI coding companion tools are growing in popularity, and many organizations are asking their development teams to use these tools with the goal of producing code faster and with fewer defects. However, large is the number of developers complaining about not being able to use them because "they are not smart enough" to understand their programming intentions. Anecdotally, this happens because, like a new developer during their first day in the job; there is no understanding of the existing code base, they have no clue about which frameworks are being used, and what is the required coding style.

This session will get into the weeds about how developers can explore the potential of AI coding companion tools by treating them as a new developer requiring proper onboarding. It will share day-to-day scenarios of developer problems and how these tools can help them if properly used. Examples will use Java, Visual Studio Code, and Amazon CodeWhisperer.

Ricardo Ferreira

Ricardo works for AWS in the developer relations team. The world of developer relations is his current passion. After doing it as a hobby for +10 years, it became his full-time job after joining open source-based startups like Confluent and Elastic. Having experienced implementing developer relations programs from the ground up in these companies granted him an acute sense of what successful strategies are worth pursuing, and the ones to avoid. With +20 years of experience, he built an extensive background in distributed systems, messaging, databases, and observability. The first 10 years of his career were spent in software engineering, where his primary focus was about programming languages, compilers, debuggers, code efficiency, and development best practices. Then, he spent another 10 years working as a solution architect in companies like Red Hat and Oracle.