Thomas Dohmke

They review it, automated tests are running, verification is running and then I click a button that says merge and it merges this into the main

branch, the main line of our work.

And then an automated process starts to deploy all of that into sometimes thousands, if not tens of thousands of virtual machines in the cloud.

Right.

And so that's one such example where we have automated the work of a software developer.

So we have more time for the ever increasing complexity and demands and innovation on the creative side.

We've talked about history already a little bit.

And the way Topfer developers have always worked is that they have tried to automate as much as they can of the workflow, but also they have moved up what I call the abstraction ladder.

And 50, 60 years ago, there were still punch cards.

because that basically a hole was transistor open and not a hole was transistor closed or the other way around.

And then microprocessors came when Microsoft started in 1975.

There was a very popular

Popular is funny to say these days because it was like maybe thousands of devices in a very small scene of people, but where all of a sudden you could program the computer in a programming language.

And so the first Microsoft product was BASIC.

And BASIC, what BASIC did is abstracted the instruction set of the chip

which is ultimately numbers in hexadecimal form, abstracted that into something that is human-readable and is pseudo-English.

If you look at almost all the popular programming languages, Python, BASIC, Rust, they all have English keywords.

The reason for that is that obviously our thoughts are expressed in the language that we speak, not in computer instruction sets, right?

And so we abstracted the complexity of the chip into something that is closer to the ideas that we have, the features.

But there was still a huge gap between the description and the instruction set.