Watch Now: Kunle Oshiyoye, Software Engineer At GitHub, Breaks Down Go Testing And AI Applications At AFROTECH™ Conference 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) may dominate today’s conversations, but beneath the innovation lies traditional software engineering — the bedrock that makes these systems work.
At AFROTECH™ 2024, Kunle Oshiyoye, a software engineer at GitHub, shared insights from his work on AI technologies, his background as a graduate student at Georgia Tech studying machine learning, and his hands-on experience building and maintaining robust software systems.
During the workshop, Oshiyoye explored idiomatic patterns and practical strategies for writing effective tests in the Go programming language, emphasizing why testing serves as both a safety net and a validation strategy.
“Testing, to me at least, is a way to validate, to verify what you’re writing,” Oshiyoye said.
He referenced a favorite quote: “A good programmer is somebody who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.”
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“I really like that quote because it just emphasizes that even though we write code and we feel confident about what we’re writing, you can always be more confident in what you’re writing,” Oshiyoye added.
Designed in 2009 by Google engineers frustrated with the complexity of languages like Java and C++, Go was built in the open on GitHub and balances performance and ease of use — offering garbage collection, memory safety, strong typing without the overhead of heavyweight languages, and, most importantly, speed.
“[Go is] a really fast, really nimble, really flexible language that [we] can use for many purposes that don’t really suit the big heavy languages that we’re used to in the programming environment today,” Oshiyoye said.
Oshiyoye’s workshop at AFROTECH™ 2024 made one thing clear: The future of AI depends on the timeless principles of traditional software engineering, with an emphasis on testing.
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