For the final Women In Software Engineering event of 2020, we were delighted to be joined by leading female technologists from Google and Marley Spoon.
The theme of the evening focused on the future of software engineering and design patterns.
W.I.T. Republic’s Women in Software Engineering events were founded to connect, inspire and develop the careers of female technologists in order to make technology a more diverse and inclusive working environment for all. Don’t forget to check out our Eventbrite page for upcoming events!
Design Patterns for the Future of Software Engineering
After initial introductions, Software Engineer at Marley Spoon, Ana Schwendler, began the evening by speaking about design patterns for the future of software engineering.
Ana began by touching on why we use design patterns and how they can help to shape the future of software engineering. Design patterns are general and reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. Whilst not algorithms, design patterns give a general concept of how to solve a problem. Ana highlighted that knowing design patterns allows you to effectively communicate with other members of your tech team when developing a new feature, of refractoring processes, as everyone is aware of the idea behind the concept you are implementing.
Talking on topics that relate to the future of design patterns, Ana mentioned three things:
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) – enabling you to automate and assemble builds from developing to live, easily and in a reliable way
- Progressing Web Apps – guaranteeing that your project will be reliably available in all kinds of possible views
- Internet of Things – evolving software must be reusable and easily handed over when necessary so we need to have patterns in mind that will make this technology move forward
Design patterns are beyond programming language; therefore, you are not dependent on any structure to apply those ideas.
Ana went on to give an overview of the design patterns she has been studying recently, which fell into three categories:
- Creational: Abstract Factory, Builder, Factory Method, Object Pool, Prototype, Singleton
- Structural: Adaptor, Bridge, Composite, Decorator, Façade, Flyweight, Private Class Data, Proxy
- Behavioural: Chain of Responsibility, Command, Interpreter, Mediator, Memento, Strategy (to name a few)
To hear Ana talk more about these design patterns, watch the full video here!
A Digital Native Future: How Software Engineering is Changing
For the second talk of the event, Rania Mohamed, Cloud Solutions Architect at Google, spoke about how Software Engineering is changing.
The term ‘Digital Natives’ refers to people who were raised in the technology era. Rania emphasises how the digital native sector are changing the demands and expectations of technology; they want more accessibility and connectivity.
Digital Native is not to be confused with Digital Transformation. Digital Native is the goal, Digital Transformation is the process.
Prior to Digital Native, software developers and engineers were focused on time to business market, environment governance, business quality and B2B/B2C integration. Utilising agile methodologies, DevOps and Test Automation. Rania highlights that now this focus has shifted towards the customer experience and journey, to become proactive rather than responsive, and to build smart services. Utilising AI and Machine Learning, the Cloud, Edge Computing and the Internet of Things.
To hear Rania talk about this focus shift in depth, watch the full video here!
Thank You
We wanted to say a huge thank you to both Ana and Rania for their insightful and engaging talks, and the attendees for contributing to a great event.
If you are interested in speaking at our next event don’t hesitate to contact Women In Tech Republic directly!
