Xavier F. Gouchet is a Staff Engineer at Datadog, experienced public speaker, and proud father. Passionate about open source, testing and architecture, he has been dabbling in Android since the Cupcake days and has been working as a professional Android engineer since 2012.
Xavier F. Gouchet
Staff Engineer at Datadog
Being an ethical software engineer
In today’s world, software engineers have a lot of power in their hands, after all, someone had to write the code behind every medical cancer detection, but also behind every spam bot. They can shape the apps we use every day, craft the AIs and LLMs that are used daily to solve everyone’s questions, and have access to gigabytes of sensitive information. Having the knowledge to make almost everything possible on a phone, laptop, or server, means they need to use this knowledge wisely and responsibly.
Some decisions can seem harmless, like questionable subscription opt-in practices to a daily newsletter. Others may seem trivial, like avoiding to send a password in cleartext. However, certain decisions are much harder to detect, and even more difficult to resolve.
More than ever, developers should know about the consequences of what they build, and help shape the way apps are built tomorrow. Based on real life examples, this talk will explore common situations where engineers should think twice before pushing a PR.