Voxxed Days Ioannina 2024 - Things I learned after a decade of writing code generators

Speaker : Ioannis Canellos

Code generation is a very exciting topic as it promises to reduce the amount of boilerplate code one needs to write and maintain.
That's single-handedly the reason there are so many of them and in so many different forms (scaffolders, IDE tools, build tool extensions, command line tools and more).
Recent developments in areas like Platform engineering and AI bring new needs and capabilities respectively in code generation.
The question is should you use them? What are the possible drawbacks of using machine written code ? Should you attempt to write your own? What are the best practices of writing and using code generators?
These are some of the questions I should have asked ten years ago, before I started writing my own code generators. In this session I'll share the experiences after writing and using code generators for a decade.