We talk a lot about technical debt — postponed refactorings, shortcuts to clean up later. But what if some of our hardest problems aren’t caused by code at all? What if our biggest technical debt is social in nature? Unspoken tensions, misaligned conversations, and collaboration rituals that look healthy on the surface can reinforce power imbalances and leave people unseen or unheard. Social debt ...
Every significant software design choice—whether you’re designing a bounded context, deciding on the system boundary, settling on an architectural style, selecting a complex system integration approach, and even evaluating a block of AI-generated code—has a moment where one path just feels right. But what if that powerful 'gut feeling' is actually a cognitive bias in disguise?The human mind is a p...
How do we use objects to model a domain? Whilst Domain Driven Design (DDD) exhorts its practitioners to focus on the domain, it is surprisingly sparse on how we should accomplish that, other than a few patterns whose job is to abstract away concepts that live outside of that domain. What though of the domain model?In Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans is explicit that it relies on usage of Rebecca W...
Most change initiatives in software fail because they optimize for plans, not for behavior. Teams adopt new frameworks, roll out new tools, and attend inspiring training. But when Monday arrives, people do the same thing and the code looks the same.The problem isn’t motivation or understanding. It’s that systems quietly reinforce existing habits. Until those systems change, behavior won’t.In this ...
[TODO rewrite] Building correct distributed systems takes thinking outside the box, and the fastest way to do that is to think inside a different box. One different box is "formal methods", the discipline of mathematically verifying software and systems. Formal methods encourages unusual perspectives on systems, models that are also broadly useful to all software developers. In this talk we will l...
