Just back from the IEEE Computer Society Quantum Week in Montreal, and besides eating my weight in pastry and bagels [1], it was a great conference. The collective hardware roadmaps from the major players leaves us thinking the big wave in quantum computing is not here yet, but soon - perhaps in 5 years time for scientific applications, and within a decade for commercial utility. While the current software continues to be sparse and low-level, there are inklings of software engineers starting to build up a stack in anticipation of needing one. But besides that, and at the risk of sounding like the other hot topic - AI marketeer hype [2] - there is the sense with quantum of being present at a new phase in computing at least, if not something larger still. The concept of the computing universe is still just a hypothesis; nothing has been proved. However, I am confident that this idea can help unveil the secrets of nature. - Konrad Zuse, 1969 [3] It seems, at its core, that the univers...

The If you've been tracking the technology industry, and the software space in particular, for any amount of time you've witnessed the accelerating rate of technical change - it was always there, but now its become impossible to miss. The rate of technological change has seemed exponential for a while now, but recent advancements in AI have pushed this curve to new heights. An Accenture report released for Davos 2024 suggests that technical rate of change is seen by C-level leaders as the number one most impactful force on their business - more than financial or geopolitical matters - largely as a result of advances in various forms of AI tooling. [1] Of those surveyed, 88% see the rate of change increasing even further, and half say their organizations are not ready, even though 70% see it as a revenue opportunity. Dinosaur Developers? Today staying alive in business, especially the business of software engineering, means surfing increasingly turbulent and potentially di...