Ok, I am a big fan of automotive software. Here are some of my notes from the Keynote by Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Software Engineering, Volvo Cars.
I am amazed how much this company evolved into a super-cool software company. Here are some of their practices and my notes:
— EX90, there is a dedicated data pipeline that can extract all kind of data from the car
— Volvo is able to train the modern models on their own NVidia platform/servers to put into the car later on
— all to make the product better over time and always to make it the safest Volvo ever.
— Speed, innovation, data and compute are the future of software development
— bazel build //car — cool slogan from Volvos software dev.
Key learnings
— superset architecture/products – create a product architecture/variants that can be configured via variants; this is important as it is connected to CI/CD in the pipeline.
— massive software testing – extremely important to be able to use the rigs and vehicles all connected and optimized; important that this is fully automated
— developer experience; Zuul, Gerrit, etc. are the important cornerstones for the development environment; including tools like Bazel; he lifts up the Zuul environment because of the parallel commits – they believe that the developer’s immediate feedback is important
— jfrog artifactory as part of their software development; part of the binary transfer process
— Bazel is a solution to their compilation time problem; it has a remote cache for the parts that are already compiled
— developer experience over IT department’s rules and regulations