Software is Dead; Long Live Software!

Many developers today are only familiar with computing as a practice and a profession in the era of x86 monoculture. Over the last 30 years, manufacturing advances and several technology revolutions have provided developers the luxury of a rich ecosystem of languages and libraries that rest on a general, broad hardware platform.

But winter is coming. Several of the biggest buzzwords in technology - big data, cloud computing, internet of things - all center around the tension between rapidly diversifying hardware innovation and the limitations of legacy software architectures.

This talk tackles the existential question of what software *is*, in an age when hardware ranges from smartphones to bacterial DNA to datacenters, and the pragmatic question of how software developers can stay afloat amidst the accelerating pace of hardware disruption.