Catch tech talks by Alan Kay, Amber Case and more when Philly ETE returns this May

The mid-Atlantic conference that scans the horizon of what’s next in enterprise technology is back.

The 15th annual Philly Emerging Tech Conference — aka Philly ETE, ETE and Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprises — is set for May 4 through 6. The event, hosted by Fort Washington-based IT consulting firm Chariot Solutions, is presented ahead of Philly Tech Week 2021 presented by Comcast.

The event will take place online for the second consecutive year. All of the sessions will be presented in real time, and attendees will have an opportunity to ask questions to the speakers following each talk.

As always, the world-class roster includes open source project creators and committers, authors, and thought leaders. This year’s keynote speakers are Alan Kay, object-oriented programming pioneer; Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist; Kent Beck, the father of extreme programming; and Jessica Kerr, symmathecist.

Session speakers include Brian Goetz, Java architect; David Nolen, ClojureScript lead developer; Angie Jones, Java Champion; Nicole Forsgren, co-author of “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps“; Ron Pressler, Project Loom technical lead; Todd Montgomery, committer on the Agrona, Aeron, RSocket and FIX SBE projects; Tammy Butow, principal SRE, Gremlin; and many others.

Philly ETE does not focus on one technology or language exclusively. The program includes talks about emerging technologies developers should be aware of this spring as well as sessions about the software development process.

This year’s program covers AWS, Project Loom, infrastructure as code, web AR/VR, micro frontends, testing ML-enabled applications, chaos engineering, secure by design, GraphQL, Golang, systems thinking and much more.

Particular technologies will be completely new to some attendees, while others will have experimented with them, and still others will have used them in production. tThe content committee curates talks that will engage those who are familiar with a topic, but that those with no experience with it will still be able to follow.

For example, in her talk “Augmented Reality on the Web,” Ada Rose Cannon will give developers with no AR experience a high-level idea of what is involved with writing AR-enabled web applications. But because she is a co-chair of the W3C Immersive Web Groups, she can also discuss the road map for the immersive web specification, describe some of the challenges the standards group has had to address and provide insight into why particular decisions about the specification were made.

Talks about developer productivity and ways to think about software development include:

• “Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters” by Adam Tornhill, author of “Your Code as a Crime Scene” and “Software Design X-Rays”
• “Doing More by Doing Less: A Loafers Guide to Software Engineering” by Leemay Nassery, engineering manager at Spotify, and Matthew Hawthorne, engineer at Comcast
• “The Edges of Cutting-Edge Languages: Where does the language end and ‘user space’ begin?” by Richard Feldman, author of “Elm in Action”

Tickets for the three-day event are $89 each — and if you buy three tickets, you get one free. Attendees will have access to videos of all of the talks well before they are made available to the general public.