A coffee with… Miao Luo, director of technology strategy, QT

Software engineering already involves a lot of troubleshooting for customers. It’s just that Miao Luo wanted to solve more than the technical problems. He wanted to help solve customers’ problems by considering the broader context of the problems they face.

Now director of technology strategy at Qt Group, Miao has spent the last 20 years working at various positions from product management and sales to software engineering. He even co-founded a successful startup in the flight simulation market (Simsoft).

At Qt, he’s been largely responsible for managing teams UI/UX designers, advanced engineering teams, and product managers in building solutions for Human Machine Interfaces.

TechInformed met up with Miao to delve into the challenges software developers and designers face, what challenges lie ahead for wider tech industry, as well as the importance of simplifying software development processes in today’s turbulent economy.

What are the biggest challenges facing your industry?

One of the biggest challenges in the software technology landscape is developing solid user interfaces (UI) or Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) – basically a UI or dashboard that connects the human user to a machine, system, or device. Many of our customers talk about not having the professional designers for the HMI solutions they need today, from creating the right design asset to testing the UI assets, etc.

I still see a huge gap between designers and developers – a lot of siloing and disconnect going on between those two camps when building software. particularly user interfaces. Traditionally, ‘design’ and ‘UI’ have been created separately. So, it would mean a designer drawing up an asset using their favourite designer’s tool, passing it on to the developer, and then the developer has to somehow magically build a UI that recreates that design using code. And that UI would typically be delivered two or three months down the line. It’s just a very error-prone and time consuming process.

That’s where we come in at Qt as a software framework vendor. One of the promises we have made is we want to accelerate productivity and collaboration between designers and developers. So, for example, we’re putting ‘designer tool-friendly bridges’ in the hands of designers that give them the power to generate code based on their design assets, without the need to rewrite code.

What’s your top tip for finding tech talent?

If you’re hiring young graduates, it does matter what they’ve studied. You need to know they’ve invested time in some ‘popular’ skills that are foundational to what they’re going to build for you. If you know you’re building a product on C++, you probably want someone who’s experienced in low-level programming languages.

If you look at industrial enterprises that depend on embedded engineers, for example, some knowledge of higher language frameworks is important for building HMIs. Fortunately, I’ve been quite impressed to see that many of the graduates going into these enterprises already have some working knowledge of frameworks like Qt. That’s the kind of natural synergy you want to look for when hiring tech talent.

Why is it important to simplify software development processes?

I think it’s clear to many tech companies now that we’re stuck with a tough economy for the foreseeable future. What that means is every business has to scrutinise costs extra hard. There are other and much better ways to cut more cost than headcount: streamlining software development workflows is a significant one.

Time is money, and lots of inefficient workflows can impact your bottom line in ways you might not expect. How much time does your software compilation take? How long do you spend adapting hardware for bespoke purposes? How long does it take for an asset made by a designer to appear in a finalised UI? All these things impact productivity when working in teams. If you fix productivity, you increase your throughput. More throughput means less cost, improved time-to-market, and more competitiveness, especially in today’s economic climate.

How do you take your coffee?

“It’s an interesting question. Personally, my coffee tasting evolution has been evolving over the years, starting with an instant coffee bag with cream powder (when coffee culture initially entered Chinese households in the late 90s), to later variety range of coffee with complex shots and flavours, to nowadays only medium/dark roasted black coffee. Sometimes I find coffee tasting can be a good indicator for one’s philosophy in building a product, where initially you could be testing all possible product idea hypothesis, then experiment to find out what works, and gather the learnings to build something that people love, and quite often less is more.”

If you could have a coffee with any leader, who would it be and why?

“Oh gosh, there are many.

I would love to have a coffee chat with Steve Jobs (Although I am not sure if he drinks coffee at all). I would like to know his creative process, and how he was able to combine the arts with technology in such a harmonious way. I would also be curious to hear his thoughts in his classic story-telling style, on the current technology landscape and how he would approach to the potential next wave of industrial revolution and paradigm shift in productivity.

I would also love to chat with John D Rockefeller, to learn more about his business acumen, determination, and decision making, especially facing challenges in an era of rapidly changing industrial revolution in his time.

I would also love to chat with Jensen Huang, to learn about how he was able to discover and navigate through heaps of unobvious market signals over the past 31 years and was able to place the right bets that accentuate what was essentially a dedicated GPU for games at the beginning, to nowadays the fundamental compute power that could change every aspect of our lives through productivity with AI.”

If you were given a grant for £500,000 what would you spend it on?

I would want to create some kind of new technology stack that breaks the paradigm of today’s software engineering. To this day, I still see workflows in the space broken up into this stilted, sequential model of design, development, testing and deployment, with each requiring special personnel and resourcing. It’s kind of an old-fashioned and boring model, almost like a car production line. I’d want to invest in a solution that allows more functions to happen in parallel – something that inspires better collaboration between these camps.

What does 2024 hold for Qt?

No surprises here – AI is impacting almost everything we do at Qt. So, one big focus for us will be iterating on the ways we can use AI to improve the Qt experience for designers and developers.

We’re also prioritising new ways to help customers improve their productivity. In some ways, I feel the economic downturn has drawn more to Qt than ever because virtually all enterprises are trying to raise productivity and lower cost. That fills me with a great sense of responsibility and pride to help those companies solve that challenge – and I know we can because we’ve already been supporting over 70 industries.

What can we expect from tech this year?

I don’t think we’ve even touched the surface of the AI-enabled applications that businesses will deploy. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing some real advancements in generating UIs using AI, without any design or coding expertise – one mouse click at a time. You could envision AI-assisted quality assurance tools evolving too in such a way that coding doesn’t have to go through a time-consuming testing phase. A lot of this is already happening right in front of apps. The question is just who’s going to have the killer app.