Rik Arends

Rik Arends

Founder at Makepad

With 20+ years experience as a C/C++, JavaScript and more recently Rust developer, i’ve always been excited by using omputation for visuals and audio. For this to work you need performance, and a smooth workflow enabled by the right tooling. After having everything i wanted with C except stable code i moved to Javascript and web technologies. However this never got to the point of being able to make fast applications that use modern CPU and GPU power. Now with Rust we have a new chance. I’ve been an entrepeneur my entire life building VJ software in the 00’s, then web UI technology and web IDEs with Cloud9, and am now reimagining the developer workflow in Rust with makepad.

Programming with AI for fun.

Humans are programming computers for fun and profit, and tooling is advancing to offload more and more of that work to AI. As I am building makepad, a next generation programming tool based on Rust, in this talk I want to explore what it means to program as a human, what work we can offload to AI, and how much fun we can have writing applications on top of generative AI models.