From Amdahl to Zipf: the Physics of Software Projects
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It's easy to think software is magic - but it's not. Most of the time, it's not even sufficiently advanced. Like everything else in our world, the people you work with and the products they build are subject to the fundamental laws of nature. In this talk originally created by Pieter Hintjens, Dylan Beattie will explore the laws of our universe - from Amdahl to Zip, from Newton's Laws of Motion to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, from Conway to Murphy to Godwin to Moore. We'll look at how these laws apply to your projects, even when you pretend they don't - and why if you ignore them, your works will collapse like a badly-designed bridge.
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From Amdahl to Zipf: the Physics of Software Projects
Dylan Beattie
Dylan Beattie is a systems architect, developer, and Microsoft MVP, who has built everything from tiny standalone websites to large-scale distributed systems. He created his first web page in 1992, and he's been building data-driven interactive web applications since the days of Windows NT 4. He's currently the CTO at Skills Matter in London, where he juggles his time between working on their software platform and supporting their conference and community teams. From 2003 to 2018, Dylan worked as webmaster, then IT Manager, and then systems architect at Spotlight (www.spotlight.com), where his first-hand experience of watching an organisation and its codebase evolve over more than a decade provided him with a unique insight into how everything from web standards and API design to Conway's Law and recruitment ends up influencing a company’s code and culture.