From Mars to Your Mobile: Software Connects Our Lives

In an article that debuted today – October 4th, 2012 – Jane Wakefield, technology reporter for the BBC, asked a direct question that all who touch software should want an answer to: Can we trust the code that increasingly runs our lives? Jane does a savvy job setting up the piece by showcasing the fact the recent Mars Rover landing and the subsequent missions Curiosity will embark on is, of course, heavily dependent on the software helping to run the roaming robot. And more to the point, that this software can not fail because… well, there isn’t exactly a “Geek Squad” on the red planet quite yet.

As swiftly as Jane takes us to Mars, she then brings the focus back to you and I, making the clear point that it’s not just space-traveling robots that need clean code, but rather we all do. As new inter-connected devices creating neo-data weave their way into our society, our appliances, and even our clothing, we as a people, become more and more dependent on that software not failing us. And yet, the field of traditional software development is unfortunately known to be riddled with mistakes, bugs and ultimately failures.

Jane Wakefield then pivots her story to focus on communities of coders like TopCoder and how this newer approach to software building is paving the way forward for enterprises and government agencies alike.

We’d like to personally thank Jane Wakefield for the inclusion of TopCoder in her article today and we echo her very serious question. Can we trust the code that increasingly runs our lives? And as a polite follow up, we would ask you to think about this question: Is there a better way forward in software development through community and Open Innovation?

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