"Just give me an escape hatch!" Sooner or later, almost all reusable code that tries to draw a hard abstraction boundary around implementation details ends up with a request for direct access to things that were designed to be hidden. There's some use case that doesn't quite work ergonomically - or at all - with the current interface, and the easiest solution is to offer an escape hatch that pokes...
Why do teams struggle to build resilient systems, despite wanting and trying to? What does it take to build and deliver systems that are resilient to failure in practice?In this keynote, we will dispel the myths spun by cybersecurity (and software) orthodoxy and why traditional security principles and recommendations are ineffective for achieving real outcomes.In their place, we will explore princ...
In the last 18 months, we have seen major changes across the tech industry. An overview of what all this could mean for the next years for tech companies and software engineering teams - and how all this most certainly changes what "practical" software engineering approaches mean. Also: a look at novel and promising approaches that we've not seen in the past....
Writing software has some commonalities with science: we need to figure out how our world works. But every team works in a world of its own: different environments, languages, integrations, codebase, customers. That means we want to re-form our conception of how our world works, constantly.This session draws from scientific methods, and applies them to software teams: from systematic testing and m...
How can multiple teams work together on a single product? The common wisdom is to carefully align teams and responsibilities to create autonomous teams. But, invariably, this approach eventually runs into cross-team bottlenecks, challenges aligning responsibilities to teams, and difficulties creating cross-functional teams.Fluid Scaling Technology, or FaST, is an innovative new approach that solve...
Many developers evoke the mischievous spirit and day-to-day burden of technical debt to explain the misfortunes and troubles of their codebase and delivery. While unmanaged technical debt weighs down many codebases and exerts drag on their schedules, it is more often an effect than a cause.In this talk, we will look at what is and is not meant by technical debt — and other metaphors — with a view ...
Building distributed systems that work is hard. And scaling those systems by multiple orders of magnitude is even harder. Using examples from internet-scale consumer properties like Google, Amazon, and eBay, this talk deep-dives into the counterintuitive idea that the key to success in large-scale architecture is simplicity.We first discuss simple components like modular services, orthogonal domai...
Managing state is complicated. Humans are even more complicated. As developers, it's our job to deliver seamless and intuitive user experiences, but the sheer complexity of human behavior and the real world can make this a daunting task. In this talk, we'll explore a radical new approach to app development where language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to handle app logic...
Have you noticed that every product seems to need a rewrite to change technology, then one to implement the new security architecture, then one to clear accumulated technical debt, and then…when will it end? Even teams that used TDD and DevOps to build the last version fall in the same trap because the business changes. Are we doomed to rewrite?In this talk, Arlo will show a new way of working tha...
We need to write tests that run different scopes of the system in order to feel confident that our code behaves the way we want it to. Unfortunately, we'll never write enough tests to feel perfectly confident, so we need a strategy for which tests to focus on and which tests not to write.And this is where the arguments start. They're not always constructive and they're rarely fun.Best Practices th...
The typical problem in product engineering is not bad strategy, so much as “no strategy”. This leads to confusion, lack of motivation, and incoherent action. The next time you look for a strategy and find an empty space, instead of waiting for it to be filled, I will show you how to fill it in yourself. If you’re wrong, it forces a correction. If you’re right, it helps create focus. I’ll share how...
The early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century. A world where Docker was a job people did; K8S was a boyband (probably); Kafka was a euphemism for existential anxiety and Chaos Engineering meant, well, nothing as it hadn’t been invented yet. The Cloud … that was just weather to most people.It is 2012, and Microservices appeared on the Thoughtworks Technology Radar. 10 years ago, ...
Why do some people lead happy successful lives whilst others face repeated failure? Why are some people consistently in the right place at the right time, while others are always unlucky? Professor Richard Wiseman has worked with some of the world’s luckiest and unluckiest people to answer these fascinating questions. In this talk he reveals how people and organisations create their good fortune b...
Twenty years ago, Architecture was murdered in its sleep by Agile, as part of the assassination plot against the arch-enemy Waterfall. Fast forward to today, and Agile isn't looking too healthy either: reduced to hollow-eyed cargo culting and pointless rituals, wading through the debris of methodology pop culture, or bloated to a monstrous parody of itself in order to scale. But death aside, they ...
Is genAI going to cause doomsday? We don't know. If yes, we'll have bigger problems than talking about our jobs. But for now, we are all trying to figure out how we can stay relevant in our jobs.Let me invite you to a product manager's perspective on the topic how product development is going to change, and what options software engineers (and actually ANYONE in tech) have to stay employable....
Discover a new approach to chaos experimentation using Latency Squeeze Injection (LSI) with PRECog. We'll explain how this tool, developed for one of the world's largest financial institutions, helps continuously verify Service Level Objectives (SLOs), proactively identify service degradation points, and enhance system resilience. Learn how LSI experimentation empowers engineers to gain a precise ...
Estimating is difficult. So difficult, in fact, that many consider it a waste of time. Which it wouldn’t be if estimates were done efficiently and were accurate. Instead, many teams either manoeuvre around estimating by using bogus units such as story points, or avoid it completely by using #NoEstimates or Kanban.Your team can improve the quality of their estimates by improving their estimation pr...
So-called “Murder Boards” have a long history in politics and military operations, but they actually started at NASA as part of the engineering process. This talk revisits the format and its practical applications in software engineering. What is the psychology around them? How do we know when “murder” is appropriate? How do murder boards differ from more traditional structures like code review, p...
Existing methods to measure skills are painful, binary, and usually wrong. What if you could measure in a way that told you exactly what action to take, show you the impact of even two days of improvement, and not waste your time? While so many agile maturity models assess whether you do particular practices in particular ways, they don't usually assess your ability to change, have impact, or adap...
The future of software is the future of software maintenance.AI Language models can now write small code snippets, but can they help us with our mountains of legacy code? As the world of software development is rethought, we as Menders are in a unique position to make an impact because we have studied what truly holds the system back....
This talk delves into real-world stories of transitioning from legacy systems to modern architectures. You'll learn from firsthand experiences by spotlighting technical challenges, inevitable pitfalls, and lessons learned. But we will also go beyond the code and will explore the sociotechnical aspect of legacy migration, emphasizing the crucial role of organizational change and highlighting the si...
I know that you are excitedly trying to make things happen. Yet, a seemingly common source is creating impediment after impediment in your way. Eventually leading to this frequent question, “How do I manage up?”. You are not alone. Yet, you might also be heading down the wrong path that only escalates the challenges. Join this session to discover and explore several practical tips for improving ...
Let's explore an autonomous agent, a little program which can read, write, dream, and perhaps even think. Along the way, we'll discuss prompting, knowledge stores, the architecture of cognition, and what exactly constitutes a soul....
An understanding of psychology—specifically the psychology behind how users behave and interact with digital interfaces—is perhaps the single most valuable non-design skill a designer can have. The most elegant design can fail if it forces users to conform to the design rather than working within the “blueprint” of how humans perceive and process the world around them. This talk dives into how des...
Building software is the easy part. Evolving and maintaining it is the hard part.Preferred approaches change, team members leave, tech debt accumulates, dependencies date, ownership changes, and everyone has a lot of other work on their plate. Software decay is a very real and endemic problem for us all. So how can you break from the cycle of build, atrophy, replatform, repeat?Join us to hear abou...
All software at some point in time becomes a legacy! We like the term Heritage Application because it attributes value to the applications which are in most cases critical to the daily operations of the business.The common high-risk, expensive and time-consuming solution is to rewrite the application using the currently in-vogue methodology, language, tools, and platform technology. Unfortunately...
Many professionals suffer from impostor syndrome - a crippling anxiety that they are not “good enough” or “qualified enough” to do the job they currently have. This impacts individual, team, and organizational performance as fear of failure replaces confidence. This leads to increasingly “safe” choices that hinder innovation and output. Through her own story as the sole female on a team of engine...
Just as models should be iterative, strategic design should change when the context and our understanding of the problem evolve. As a model grows to solve more problems, it becomes less supple in its ability to evolve. Tensions arise within the model that struggles to stay coherent.Eventually it reaches a critical mass and becomes a big ball of mud.How do we know when it’s time to let new models e...
Providing the earliest images of our universe, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has pushed the frontier of space technology and deep-space imaging to a completely new level! Through a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), its first full-color images and spectroscopic data were released on July 12, 2022. These images and data have fundamentally chang...
Closed architectures are dead. But there’s a war going on : should architectures be API first to facilitate fail-fast one-to-one interactions or Event first to facilitate fan out interactions where eventual consistency is acceptable?In this talk, I will describe the concept of AFEA (API first, Event always architectures) which allow:Designing services by first thinking in terms of API and events t...
Are you and your organization in pursuit of exponential growth? Trying to achieve a compound increase in the impact and value you create? Are you struggling with increasing complexity all across? Slowed by growth pains and legacy systems? I can relate.Over the past years, together with the talented team at Vinted, we have been turning these challenges into opportunities for innovation and success....
The idea that leadership is exclusive to management is a myth that we need to debunk once and for all.This session is about showing how individual contributors (ICs) at any level can lead through actions and influence, not titles. We'll break down what real leadership looks like, proving it's about problem-solving and the ability to guide others, no matter your job description.Join us to discover ...
Embracing cloud-native technologies and shifting towards a modern infrastructure model is a transformative journey filled with strategic decisions and technical challenges. In this presentation, we delve into the intricacies of migrating 2500 applications to a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment integrated with Zero Trust Istio. Adopting new technologies to meet business demands poses complex cha...
At first, programming was about code.At some point, tests became code. This introduced a new feedback loop and programming changed.Then, infrastructure became code. This too introduced a new feedback loop and programming changed again.Now, tools are becoming code. This is also introducing a new feedback loop and programming is changing yet again.Tools as code are tools that can be adapted and exte...
“Humans became behaviourally modern the moment they committed to storing abstract information outside their brains.” —Lyn WadleyWe often bridge the gaps that exist between teams and stakeholders involved in the success or failure of a system or project. Because of this, information is hitting us from every direction. How we capture, organize, distill, and express this information is critical to ou...
What is real cooperation. How to cooperate in a way, you care for yourself and others as well.When to give feedback? How to do it?How to receive feedback?All what I plan to share with you, is based on my experience practicing Nonviolent Communication (NVC)...
Resilience is an important issue these days. Many companies claim to have a resilient IT, very few have one.What does it mean to be resilient? How do we get there? How can we figure out where we currently are? How can we improve?We will look at several gradations of becoming resilient. We will examine their properties and tradeoffs and how to get there. We will discuss what we can achieve at an IT...
Data Science has demonstrated its value in extracting insights from business data, raising the question: Why not apply these principles to our software systems’ data? In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the world of Software Analytics. We’ll explore how to extract valuable insights from software data by using tools and techniques from data science to get rid of big, systemic problems in our softwa...
In the evolving narrative of DevOps, the next chapter is being written not just by human hands but also by the nuances of artificial intelligence. Central to this transformation is the exploration of the potential AI models, particularly ChatGPT, might hold when tailored to the specific needs of DevOps environments. This session offers an insightful gaze into a groundbreaking open-source project: ...
In most systems today there is an inherent misalignment between software architecture, organizational structure, and the domain. This misalignment results in friction and makes efficient and coherent development unnecessarily hard.I will show you a holistic approach to modeling that uses system thinking and Domain-Driven Design to explore and map the various forces that influence your system archi...
“Picking metrics is the hardest part.” Wouldn’t it be great if that were true? The hardest part is everything around the metrics, and it’s those decisions that will determine whether your organisation is able to use metrics effectively – or if they’re actually going to cause your engineering culture to take a nosedive. In this talk, we’ll compare and contrast successful initiatives to improve deve...
Measuring the Return on Investment of SRE efforts seems like a straightforward exercise, and many tools for incident management support some view of this data. However, a lot of important data can be masked in those views. In this talk, I will discuss how to measure Mean Time To Fail, Mean Time To Detect, and Mean Time To Repair/Restore to have clarity about whether your team is improving over tim...
In this talk we will look at the key Fallacies of Test-Driven Development, such as 'Developers write Unit Tests', or 'Test After is as effective as Test First' and explore a set of Principles that let us write good unit tests instead. Attendees should be able to take away a clear set of guidelines as to how they should be approaching TDD to be successful. The session is intended to be pragmatic ad...
Generative AI and Its Impact in the WorkplaceAbstractThe keynote speech will discuss the potential benefits and challenges of using generative AI in the workplace. It will cover topics such as increased efficiency, improved accuracy, and reduced costs, as well as ethical concerns, security risks, and the potential loss of jobs. The speech will also provide best practices for implementing generativ...
Copilot Workspace is a reimagined developer inner loop. The focal points of the experience are selecting a task, expressing intent, and then collaborating with AI towards a solution. We believe this can dramatically reduce complexity, improve productivity, and delight developers, without taking away the aspects of software development that they value most, such as decision making, creativity, and ...
Have you ever fixed the same bug twice, in two different codebases? Do you go back-and-forth between platform teams to ensure their implementations behave the same way? Are you wasting time duplicating functionality? These are typical issues that can be solved by using shared code across platforms.Building with Kotlin Multiplatform not only allows you to share code easily, but it also plays nicely...
In the 1950s and 1960s, when we first started writing software at industrial scale (and “computer” was a job, not a machine), programming was really hard! It was slow, error-prone, and demanded complex rituals and incantations to make anything work. Back then, software was a byword for missed deadlines, blown budgets, and machines going haywire. In short, software was a mess.Seventy years on, w...
I believe great programmers are not born, they are made. Or rather, they make themselves, carefully and deliberately over time. I am not talking about the folks who rote-learn the l33t answers and throw their egos around; I mean the ones who build great products using simple, understandable code, while lifting up those around them.I have worked with some great programmers over the years, and met s...
Do you have a microservices system with inadequate automated tests that is essential to your business? In order to get this situation under control, often there’s an initiative to improve the unit tests. This is a positive move, however in a microservices system a lot of the behaviour happens between the units and services. End-to-end automated tests can be more effective at finding bugs, but are ...
Modern organizations operate in fast-moving environments with increasing demands, technological innovations, and market competition. Furthermore, they operate on more unpredictable and complex problems, so they can't use the old thinking models of experts planning and architecting up-front solutions. Instead, they must develop suitable organizational structures and architectures that can evolve su...
DevOps is a cultural phenomenon that has broken down silos, increased velocity and improved productivity immeasurably. While new tools have emerged to embrace the “everything as code” philosophy, programming languages themselves still are siloed in their purpose. What if… a single DevOps centric language could create resources, secure communications, ensure least privilege permissions and execute ...
Teams at NASA and JPL that create mission-critical software for spacecraft take a principled approach to fault tolerance. Let's see how those same principles, centered around a concept of transparency, can help us achieve reliability in pragmatic, modern software delivery settings.As our society continues to depend more and more heavily on software, the need for that software to be reliable also i...
The field of Computer Science is headed for a major upheaval with the rise of large AI models, such as ChatGPT, that are capable of performing general-purpose reasoning and problem solving. We are headed for a future in which it will no longer be necessary to write computer programs. Rather, I believe that most software will eventually be replaced by AI models that, given an appropriate descriptio...
Residuality theory is a revolutionary new theory of software design that aims to make it easier to design software systems for complex business environments. Residuality theory models software systems as interconnected residues - an alternative to component and process modeling that uses applied complexity science to make managing uncertainty a fundamental part of the design process. ...
Entropy in software design refers to the accumulation of disorder and randomness over time, which poses challenges for maintenance and evolution. This session delves into the intricacies of entropy in software design and explores strategies rooted in complexity theory to manage it effectively. We will examine how leveraging frameworks such as the Cynefin framework and the Estuarine Map, pioneered ...
Tech is evolving faster than ever, sparking an endless demand for technical expertise.Join Jess Brock, a pioneer in immersive learning, as she shares practical advice grounded in real-world experience to enhance the learning effectiveness of technical teams and individuals....
Virtual threads in the JDK 21 just became generally available, but how did we get here and why are they significant improvements of Java in terms of multiprocessing? In this journey we'll revisit the basics of multiprocessing and what techniques and frameworks are available out there, who knows maybe you get as much excited as I am about this topic :)...
This is just one of the questions that point in the same direction. Who builds your car? Who sells your car? Who does the check-up of your car? Who shares your car? And WHY?Software has become an integral part of the automotive industry, revolutionizing the way we experience our vehicles. It enhances safety, convenience and entertainment, making our journeys more enjoyable. With continuous softwar...
Development teams face the problem of making a ton of technology choices at every phase of a project. The amount of new libraries, frameworks, and tools available today is outstanding. Most of us tend to use convenient technologies from our last assignment, typically where we have the most experience. But is it the best choice? Aren’t we withholding ourselves from the opportunity to innovate?How c...
Vector databases have quickly become a fundamental component in the GenAI technology stack. They are very powerful tools and unlock many possibilities, but using them in the right way is often a challenge and far from straightforward. This talk will take you on a guided tour to vector databases, laying the conceptual and algorithmic foundations and then giving practical insights on how to harness ...
Explore the complex relationship between architectural design and community impact, delve into the story of eclectic architecture, its successes and failures, and draw parallels to the challenges faced in software development and urban planning....
Discover how integrating heavy engineering principles into IT solutions can lead to more nuanced problem-solving approaches. Learn to apply broad engineering concepts to coding, fostering an engineer’s mindset in software development....
From walk-in walk-out stores with automated price optimisations to vehicle route pathfinding, how AI and ML are changing the retail experience for the betterment of customers, employees, suppliers, and the planet....
Join our local leaders for an insightful roundtable discussion, where experts will share their experiences and insights on the application of Generative AI at Accenture. Discover how Generative AI is revolutionizing our approach to application development, data engineering and driving our innovation. From supporting our daily activities in generating code until helping our colleagues in data analy...
The smooth flow of global air travel relies on countless people behind the scenes. This talk delves into the software development journey behind an AI agent designed to empower operation controllers whose job is to efficiently execute the daily flight plan and react to irregularities. We'll explore innovative techniques like event sourcing, event-driven architecture and reinforcement learning. Joi...
The vast majority of automotive projects is safety-critical by nature. Malfunctioning vehicle systems can lead to accidents that threaten human lives, correctly operating active safety and driver assistance systems however contribute substantially to road safety. Accordingly, these projects have to comply with various strict development standards and processes such as ISO26262 or ASPICE which are ...
Twelve years ago the radically re-thought functional database Datomic released. I have used this wonderful database for eleven of those years, and here are the neatest, coolest, and most interesting things I've learned about it since....
This talk will be a masterclass about everything you wanted to know (and potentially what you didn't even know you wanted to know) when it comes to function composition and combinators. We will cover the different "composition strategies" used in languages like Haskell, APL, J, KAP, Jelly, Uiua, Clojure and more. Furthermore, we will in more detail cover the most common combinators and the pattern...
Healthy teams, high performance, buzzwords we've all heard, yet how do we truly unlock their potential? Despite knowing the theory, fostering truly effective teams remains a challenge. As the European automotive industry faces unprecedented competition, it's time for a shift in our approach. Are we equipped with the practical strategies and boldness needed to thrive in this changing landscape?Join...