I gave this talk at SC London 2018. It’s one of my favourite talks to date, focused on exploring a few different, out of the box approaches to understand and improve software development. I tried to draw parallels between code and programming on one side, and material physics, design, or engineering on the other side. You need to be aware that this is an exploratory talk, and therefore doesn’t have many answers. Instead, it raises a few interesting questions.
Here’s the summary:
“As a child of science fiction, the words that captured my imagination from the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship were ‘Raising the bar’. How can we raise the bar? What is the realm of possibility? What is beyond what we imagine possible? In this talk, I will go through a number of ideas that can help raise the bar. Here are a few:
- Reaching out to scientists
- Turning back time to fix our design mistakes
- Mixing software development with other domains: usability, material physics, or maths
- Get inspired from the work of other designers
- Fundamental properties
My hope is that these ideas will capture your imagination and you will help improve, test and implement some of them.”
And the video:
Enjoy!