The remarkable advances in hardware miniaturization, performance, and cost reduction have enabled a world of pervasive IoT devices. However, while other platforms—mobile, clients, and servers—have wholeheartedly adopted modern development practices, languages, tools, and runtimes, IoT application development remains largely unchanged. This stagnation has resulted in IoT application development remaining a specialized craft. As device complexity increases, development budgets surge while reliability and security decline.

Drawing from four decades of experience in embedded applications, this talk examines why IoT applications present unique challenges and explores why alternatives to traditional C development have struggled to gain traction. We share insights from our experience with modern development approaches for IoT and advocate for an application-centric paradigm that enables complex IoT development through low-code approaches, executed on efficient, compact embedded runtimes.

Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an executive, investor, board member, consultant, architect, and engineer. He is Chairman of Bedarra Corp, which provides consulting on technology and business strategy for emerging technology, products and services. Bedarra provides virtual CTOs, as well as directors, advisors and mentors to support new initiatives.

Dave served as Chief Scientist/CSO of Kx Systems, First Derivatives Plc. He co-founded Bedarra Research Labs, creators of the Ivy visual analytics workbench. Dave is the founder of YOW! Conferences and Workshops. He was Managing Director of Object Mentor - company specializing in the training and deployment of Agile and Object-Oriented Software Development methodologies. Founder and past CEO of Object Technology International (OTI), becoming CEO of IBM OTI Labs after its sale to IBM. Recognized as an ACM Distinguished Engineer for his contributions to Object Technology.

With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, he is known for his contributions to Object Technology including IBM VisualAge and Eclipse IDEs, Smalltalk and Java virtual machines.

Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is a thought leader in large-scale software engineering and a founding director of the Agile Alliance.

With close links the R&D community Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University in Canada and held past positions at UQ and QUT in Australia. He has been a business and technical advisor to many technology companies.

Dave is founder of the YOW! Australia and Lambda Jam conferences, and is a GOTO Conference Fellow.