I recently sat down with Bant Breen on The UNCAGED Show to discuss my career as a fractional CTO at BetterSoftware.dev and Founder at The Software Factory. This is an edited excerpt from our discussion.
Bant Breen:
Welcome to Uncaged. Today we’re speaking with James Dixson. Now, we’re going to be talking a lot about technology. James has an extensive career as a CTO. He is the founder of the Software Factory, which is a fractional CTO service company. He’s also the chief technology partner at BetterSoftware.Dev which specializes in helping organizations with large software teams. We’re talking about a thousand-plus engineers mature their software development practices. So technology, technology, technology. And as we all know, there’s not a shortage of topics in the tech space. So I’m excited to get into that. But before we get there, James, tell us a little bit about you and your career.
James Dixson:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. So I’ve been building software now for 30 years. My degree originally was in astronomy, believe it or not. But I figured out early on that I enjoyed building things more and writing great proposals. So I moved out of astronomy and I started in quality assurance for a carrier-class telecom company. I built automation tools in C and this language called Tcl Expect, which not many people know about anymore, but was very popular in the day. And it was kind of a midsize corporation. I learned a lot about building long-timescale projects there, very standards-driven, and very technical. After doing that for a few years, I jumped into the dot com boom, and in the late nineties, I was part of the first startup focusing on test automation software for large enterprises. So again, talking to people like Bell Labs, Qualcomm, and Nortel, and then after the telecom boom ended, I bounced around in a few other datacom startups. I worked for one of the first great computing companies where we were commercializing a version of the city-at-home technology. If you or your viewers remember that little tool back then. And I learned things about using IAC for chat apps and building all kinds of processes around that. Overall, I’ve worked for maybe a dozen startups over the years and I’ve been acquired four times.
Bant Breen:
Last year, suddenly machine learning or generative AI went from not being a topic that was even discussed really, to now being the only topic that gets asked of us. I’d just be curious how that’s impacting some of the work that you and the team are doing.
James Dixson:
Well, I think I see a lot of the impact on a more practical level, right? Many of the companies that we consult with certainly have some AI machine learning data science aspect to them. And there’s the nuts and bolts of data science, and machine learning. And then there’s the AGI type that you hear about going inside. For most companies, the practical concern is just how you try to integrate something like AI or machine learning into your product. Now startups are going to try and form and they’re going to go direct and try to build a new plug-in project, GPT, or whatever, right?
But for a large established company, it may be something a lot more mundane and may just be something as simple as, let’s say I’ve got a medical device and that device is making measurements. Is there a way that I can use machine learning data to enhance that product? And then, what’s involved in that? If you’re in a regulatory environment, what does that mean from regulatory compliance to incorporate a machine learning model into your workflow? What is the output going to do? And so for a lot of these companies that are trying to walk into that piece, it’s kind of disentangling and trying to understand what that means for validation certification, for quality, to incorporate that technology into their existing product lines. So I think there’s a mix right there. Definitely hype, There’s a lot of angst in some markets, but in others, it’s much more practical. You know, how do I manage hundreds of models that maybe I have to change weekly to make something work?
Bant Breen:
Well, that definitely seems exciting. Thank you so much, James, for being on Uncaged. I really enjoyed our conversation, and look forward to having you back on the show.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:
