Vadim Zaytsev
Raincode
Belgium

Vadim Zaytsev has a publication track record in pure and applied research, has supervised more than 25 graduate students, and currently works as a Chief Science Officer at Raincode, a company recently prized by Microsoft as the top performer in mainframe migration.

Two Sides of Grammarware Engineering

Abstract. The worlds of industrial software engineering and of academic computer science research have a mutual love-hate relation. University researchers investigate problems that have never been solved before, reluctantly replicate experiments done by others and tend to look down on simple people they call "practitioners" that concern themselves with routine tasks of coding, testing and maintenance, which are of course trivial, yet they are being increasingly expected to demonstrate their ability to collaborate with software companies and the relevance of their solutions for them. On the opposite side, "true" software developers have a lot of respect for doctoral and professorial titles and achievements, which they effortlessly combine with a universal assumption that anyone with an extensive academic background ultimately lacks any technical knowledge and any practically useful skills.

The keynote story will unfold around a journey of a grammar engineer versed in both scientific research and computer programming, following his transitions from research on grammars to teaching software engineering to analysing legacy code and developing migration tools. We will see examples of grammar and compiler engineering, reverse engineering and re-engineering undertaken in industrial and academic contexts, seek similarities, mismatches and lessons to be learnt.