The IT industry is growing rapidly. New technologies and knowledge are being created, ideas and startups are emerging, industry giants are leading in capitalization in the lists of the largest companies in the world, and more traditional areas of human activity are increasingly using IT solutions in their development. But what is happening right now? What should not be missed in order to find a worthy place in the future?
To understand this, we decided to find out the opinions of the speakers of our YaTalks conference, which will be held in Moscow on November 30 . Among our speakers are Alexander krainov Krainov, Andrey yafinder Plakhov, Andrey styskin Styskin, Eugene eross Rossinsky, Roman romas1982 Ivliev. And here are the questions they answer today:
- What events in the IT world over the past year did you remember the most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
- What important books / articles / speeches on the development topic have happened over the past year? What do you recommend studying for those who want to be in the subject?
- What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
Alexander Krainov , Head of Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Yandex
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
I think that the biggest event was the story of the ban of Huawei. Its consequence may be the emergence of a new, alternative to Android, operating system and, in general, some fragmentation. Now there can be no definite certainty that the use of alien ecosystems does not carry great risks.
If we talk about technological trends, then I am very impressed with the progress in machine translation and in speech synthesis, as well as in image generation. GAN networks and their various modifications make it possible to obtain increasingly realistic images, which, in turn, gave rise to the direction of detection of generated content. Apparently, a big battle lies ahead.
More interesting events take place in the field of photo processing during the shooting process. Decisions based on obtaining one frame by combining several produce impressive results. It seems that everything is not exhausted yet. We can expect a significant increase in the quality of photos due to automatic processing.
What important books / articles / speeches on development have happened over the past year? What do you recommend studying for those who want to be in the subject?
It all depends on a specific topic. I would advise you to read articles on topics of interest from all the top profile conferences. In computer vision, these are CVPR, ICCV / ECCV, ICLR. More generally ML is NeurIPS and ICML.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
We must learn to learn. Everything is developing so fast that without the ability to acquire new knowledge it is difficult to count on success. And it would be a big mistake to consider that the acquired knowledge as a whole is enough. No matter how deep and extensive they may be.
Although, of course, both basic knowledge of algorithms and programming skills will remain necessary in the future.
Alexey Bashkeev , Head of Technology and Product Development, Yandex
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
I may be traumatized by my dissertation (theoretical work on entangled quantum states), but I am very pleased with the progress of these guys in creating quantum computers. Frankly, I thought that this might not happen during my lifetime, and this is one of the reasons why I quit basic science and retrained as an applied specialist. Fifteen years ago, it seemed that all this would be achievable in some decades, but I did not want to wait until the level of technology reached practical implementation.
Now I don’t know what to expect in the next 15 years. It is possible that quantum computing will turn the world we are used to and will start to penetrate our lives as elegantly as machine learning of all kinds does. But one thing is certain: the next 10-20 years will be very interesting for new aspects of computer science.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
First of all, learn some rather complicated language while you still have time for this. I would recommend C ++ or Java. Not so much the syntax of the language as the algorithms and data structures, their implementation in specific languages. Going from language to language, as practice shows, is not so difficult, but fundamentally understanding basic programming is better at the beginning of a career than catching up later.
Do not pursue hype technology. All these new programming languages and “some-cool-thing.js” are often short-lived things, many of them are difficult to gain and maintain popularity. Features of many languages can be mastered. If during an interview you are asked how a particular function is literally called in some language, it is better to run away from this company, then they will ask you something else.
Understand mathematical statistics and probability theory. If, after hearing the word “percentile” at a workshop, you go to Wikipedia, then you missed something important. If you are not lucky and you did not have such a subject or a really good teacher, modern online education can easily fill this gap.
And most importantly: at the beginning of a career, it is better to find a good enough leader. Anyone who agrees to spend enough time and effort on you will share his experience. And with whom you will be comfortable working. A good leader at the beginning of a career can save several years spent in career building.
Well, I would advise starting a career with a big company. It’s good for a resume, and in general it’s better to see how it all works on a large scale from the inside, before deciding whether you like such a world, whether you want to further develop it within the walls of a large organization or whether it’s better to file your startup with a friend.
Alexey Milovidov , Head of Development, ClickHouse, Yandex
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
The most talked about IT news was the events around the Boeing 737 MAX, as well as the trade war with Huawei. Important events in this year's open source world were sales of nginx, RedHat and GitHub; Changing the license of MongoDB and some others; the departure of the founders of Python, as well as the FSF. Now the story is developing with TON and Libra - we will follow the events.
What important books / articles / speeches on development have happened over the past year? What do you recommend studying for those who want to be in the subject?
I recommend reading about the analysis of the incident in CloudFlare . I also recommend an interesting discussion about bad code examples .
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
If you are just starting out, I advise you to create an account on GitHub and try to find some simple tasks in popular open source products. A pool request to a well-known open source product usually includes the entire cycle of preparing changes and ensuring their quality. So you can get a good profile on GitHub, employers pay attention to this. If knowledge is not enough - it is worth looking at online courses. For C ++, I recommend the course “Fundamentals of C ++ Development” - it consists of several parts in increasing complexity: white belt, yellow belt, etc.
Andrey Plakhov , Head of Search Functionality, Yandex
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
Horror of the year . Doubtful, to put it mildly, the practices in project management, design and development adopted by Boeing during the development of the 737 Max model led to two terrible disasters with hundreds of casualties. Although the story at first glance does not look completely IT, it is intuitive for any programmer who worked in large companies, and the fatal bug itself was essentially software. Development has been going on for many years, but all these errors have so terribly manifested and were realized only this spring. In its consequences, including financial, this story is a good contender for entering the “top of all time”. An excellent detailed account of the story in English can be found here .
A joke of the year . The developer of one of the popular JS-modules began to insert advertisements shown to the developer in the terminal at the time of assembly into their code. Fortunately, the “invention” was not picked up and the trend did not become.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
I’ll write a banal, but rarely spoken aloud thing. To always be in demand in the labor market, a developer needs to write and read a lot of code. Desirable - one that would do something useful. It is desirable different. Only from specific trifles, trivialities, all this soup from ifs, shifting JSONs and debilitating debug ending with a mitt, will your own vision, professionalism and ability to do something much more gradually arise.
There is no shortcut, even if you are very, very, very smart. Yes, reading books and blogs with all wisdom and a generalized outlook on the world is also very useful, but until you spend your five thousand hours just writing code, you won’t understand useful thoughts, but it’s easy to catch a bullet. And yes, specific technologies and trends in the labor market can be important, but the pumped encoder muscle works as a multiplier to your ability to quickly and efficiently master them.
Andrey Styskin , head of the search portal, Yandex
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
The most noticeable trend for me is the development of various processors and, in particular, the GPU. Demand for cars well pushed crypto mining, but now mining is gradually decreasing, and capacities are being reused for ML tasks. Thanks to this, you can see more and more news about various curious applications of machine learning methods in the generation and modification of images and videos. I think that in the future we will have an interesting development, especially in the field of specific mobile processors, which will allow us to invent even more interesting applications.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
Learn ML and program as much as possible! To always stay on the crest of a wave, you need to very quickly run and study, study, study. ML is now undergoing rapid development and will be in trend for a very long time. The industry is constantly in need of new specialists, but there are always not enough truly universal fighters, who can be given great responsibility. Therefore, having achieved success in this area, you can not be afraid for your future employment.
Programming will continue to be a highly demanded skill that will help a specialist in any specialty to keep his efficiency at a high level. In order not to lose, but to gain your programming form, just write a lot of different code.
Grigory Sapunov , co-founder and CTO, Intento
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
- More interesting hardware is appearing: specialized processors for ML / AI, mobile and more (come to the report!), Programmable SSD, persistent memory, and increasingly faster wireless networks. The batteries only seem to be not progressing enough. :)
- There are many different interesting options for distributed computing, starting with a blockchain that has gotten sick of it, to distributed training of neural networks, which has long been commodity, federated learning, edge computing, etc.
- The threshold for entering the applied AI (primarily the use of neural networks) has drastically decreased, many interesting applications can already be assembled from almost ready-made blocks, no one has guessed about this yet. Be the first to guess!
- A huge number of cloud-based cognitive services for data processing (machine translation, picture classification, speech recognition, etc.) have appeared, which can also be trained for your tasks, knowing almost nothing about machine learning. You do not need to create a data science department in the company (if this is not a core thing for you), you do not need to deploy and maintain your infrastructure. You can simply use it by writing not the most complex integration.
- Serverless theme is developing, I like it. It seems to be already possible to use meaningfully, but, it seems, globally there is still an unplowed field.
What important books / articles / speeches on development have happened over the past year? What do you recommend studying for those who want to be in the subject?
A lot of things happened in NLP (Transformers / BERT and their followers), a lot of things happen in generative models (GAN and not only) and especially in the context of deepfakes (some of my review is here ), a lot of interesting things happened in the field of AI, able to play in games (OpenAI Five / Dota 2, AlphaStar / StarCraft, Pluribus / Poker).
Read the latest articles! https://arxiv.org/ , http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/ , subscribe to interesting authors on Google Scholar, subscribe to our channel in a telegram: https://t.me/gonzo_ML .
There is also a video of my relatively recent presentation on the subject of neural network architectures .
Take a look at Federated Learning .
Take a look at Swift for TensorFlow , take a look at NVidia's Neural Modules ( nemo ). Neural networks are moving along the lines of traditional programming languages, towards greater typification and to a higher level of expression of your thoughts. Look at the MLIR .
If you live in the JVM ecosystem, look towards Kotlin, if not already.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
Everything is pretty commonplace.
- Master the modern neural network framework (TensorFlow 2.0 or PyTorch), learn how to solve different problems on it.
- Make some pet project and publish it (demo site, turnip on GitHub, library or your framework, article, ...).
- Follow the trends, read articles, see what's new from Google, Facebook, DeepMind, OpenAI, Nvidia - continue the list yourself.
- Chat with colleagues! Alternatively, settle in a company where many smart people around are busy with something interesting for you. Or think about your startup and some interesting product that you could make.
- See what happens in other areas of ML, AI and CS (evolutionary computing, artificial life, neuro-symbolic computations, SAT-solvers, cryptography, distributed computing, quantum computing, ...) that happens at the junction with the humanities.
- Do not forget about ethics and what tasks you solve and for what.
Yes, and that was all about the next two years. I’ll say about the next two in a year or two. It is difficult to plan for ten years, but if the question is that way, then you will get some good fundamental education (physics, mathematics, modern biology, ...), it will not disappear. And be open to the world!
Eugene Rossinsky , CTO, ivi
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
- I cautiously expect how exercises will be held to isolate the Russian segment of the Internet, something should fall off.
“It’s quite interesting how the hardware manufacturers see the future and what devices they create to ensure the firm treads of AI across the planet .” It is very interesting to watch the eternal swings of the ideologies of thick and thin clients.
- I would like the leading companies to deal with AI issues not only using other people's models, but also creating their own. The greatest attention should be paid to this in the development of the currently fashionable trend.
- Speaking about our direction, it is very interesting to observe how the average bitrate grows from year to year when watching videos on mobile networks. These trends are very encouraging and allow you to make more delicious products - both in terms of interfaces, and in terms of picture quality in video.
What important books / articles / speeches on development have happened over the past year? What do you recommend studying for those who want to be in the subject?
- Sasha Tobol told very good reports about how to punch NAT, how to properly prepare TCP for different types of content.
- I always read Netflix tech blog with interest, it comes across very interesting articles such as these:
- Netflix's Production Technology = Voltron
- Building a Cross-platform In-app Messaging Orchestration Service .
- As a member of the Highload program committee, I learn a lot of new things by looking at reports and discussing them with colleagues. I strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the materials and reports from the November conference.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
Do not get attached to specific technologies, pump the theoretical base and communication skills. No one knows what will be in demand from a technology point of view, but a tough engineer who is able to quickly adapt to new tools, who knows how to communicate with colleagues and play as a team will always be torn off with his hands.
Roman Ivliev , CTO, mos.ru
What events in the IT world over the past year do you remember most? What interesting happened, what interesting trends are there that are worth paying attention to?
It’s difficult to navigate events. A lot of them.
- From the last I can note the departure of Guido van Rossum from Dropbox, this is hardly something important, but Guido is a person.
- A number of scandals in large communities such as the Linux Foundation related to various statements by their participants. Before, it seems to me, there were much less scandals. I'm not a fan of soap, but it is straightforward. Dear people remain overboard. It is sad.
- Enchanting cancellation of PHP Central Europe due to diversity issues .
Trends that, it seems to me, are now in the top:
- Diversity. This word tightly entered the vocabulary of everyone in and around IT. They began to talk about this a lot from different sites. As a result, it seems to me that the community was divided into two halves. Pros and cons. Indifferent, in fact, did not remain.
- SRE. This thing straight added a lot in 2019 in the community, although the topic itself was raised by Google back in 2016.
- AI, ML, the Internet of things, big data and everything around. This is a directly steadily increasing trend. Many large offices are very heavily invested in this area, it will develop and progress. The community reciprocates.
- Total digitalization and digital transformation. Non-IT-offices actively began to drown in this direction. You can track the number of events about digital transformation.
- The growing influence of IT tops on the lives of their offices. STO, CDTO, CIO began to receive large parts of the business in their management.
- The growing interest in quantum computing.
- Edge computing.
- And of course, IB. Around leaks, sinks, trade in staff and more.
What important books / articles / speeches on development have happened over the past year? What do you recommend studying for those who want to be in the subject?
Who wants to be in the topic - you need to constantly monitor the trends. It is difficult to offer something. Cool articles and speeches appear every week. Many articles appear on company blogs and often reach me through third parties.
Here you need to subscribe to various IT channels and join groups (Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn). It’s impossible to keep track of everything, but constantly reviewing the field of science and technology where you work is vitally important, whether it be PHP, Go or Mongo. Something constantly happens, new software comes out, new approaches to development are wise, in general, there is movement. But if it is not in the radius of the square of the technologies that you are engaged in, then it’s time to think about whether everything is right in your life. Of course, you can watch only Habr and CNews, but this, in my opinion, is a couple of percent of what is happening in the world.
What do you recommend to current developers and those who are just learning? What to do right now, in a year (two, five, ten) to be in demand in the labor market?
Constantly monitor trends and develop in parallel with them. Extra knowledge does not happen. Unless there’s not enough time for everything. Therefore, you need to keep focus and leave room for everything that is around your main area. I am sure that the IT market as a whole will develop in all directions, be it web development, ML or IoT. Even if in the framework of the work it is not required to learn something new (it happens), you need to act proactively, watch technology, listen to reports from conferences, understand what the industry breathes. This will allow you to feel more confident in the market. If after 10 years, of course, robots will not replace us.
The YaTalks conference will take place on November 30 at the Paveletsky Space conference hall in Moscow. Registration is open and available here .