Lambdas. All the cool kids have them in their languages. But does 'lambda' mean what Java, C#, Python, C++, etc. mean by 'lambda'? Where did lambdas come from? What were they originally for? What is their relationship to data abstraction?In this talk we will dive into the history, the syntax and the uses of lambdas and the way in which lambda constructs in various languages do (or do not) match th...
We all hate legacy code and want to modernize our old systems. But the journey from the architecture we have now to the shiny new modernized system we want to have can be long.Along the journey we have to choose patterns for migrating from the current to the new architecture. Most likely we will have new and old running in parallel for many months or multiple years. That means we need to keep mult...
In the tech industry, we are most interested in knowledge stock: What do you know? What information can you apply easily? Whiteboard tests, for example, assess a candidate's stock of knowledge.This focus is holding many individuals, teams and organizations back. As relational complexity increases, individual knowledge stock is insufficient. What we need is knowledge flow.When we craft and share kn...
Capacity planning is an exercise undertaken by teams to plan how much work they can complete for a given sprint/iteration/timebox.At scale, Programme Increment(PI) planning has a stronghold on our industry, however, this usually means mandating a single approach of normalised story points, limiting the freedom teams have in choosing their own way of working.In this talk, Nick will share how he has...
We make decisions all the time in software - our architectures are the sum of them; both conscious and unconscious. Yet we have so little awareness about what decisions are and how we decide. This is not only the source of great friction and waste, it is leading to terrible outcomes for our software. In this talk I’ll describe what architectural decisions are, and the different ways that we approa...
Before the pandemic, whiteboards were everywhere. Now that we are remote, where did they go? Let's talk about how they help us sync and why we still need them. Learn tips and tricks on how to use virtual whiteboards in virtual offices.In this talk, we will show techniques to quickly sketch out visualizations of coding problems and complex system architectures using online platforms such as Miro, M...
After over 2 years of high attention on coding assistants, many engineering managers are disappointed by the measurable results, and engineers are suffering from hype fatigue, even the ones who have learned to love their new AI team mate. Meanwhile, the pace of change in the AI tooling space is still quite high, which contributes further to the fatigue.This presentation gives an overview of the to...
I will discuss how I think platforms should be structured, and why it’s always plural, there isn’t one platform or one platform team. I base this on four principles. The first principle: it isn’t one platform, The second principle: platform layers are dynamic. The third principle: the interface should be driven by the users of the platform. The fourth principle: a clear distinction should be made ...