Speaker
Abstract
Every day developers have to work with code influenced by past decisions made by non-technical departments. Every day there are defects and other obstacles caused by non-technical factors that are nonetheless reflected in your code. Isn’t it time we make the implicit explicit, and embrace the organic, evolving nature of our software?
In this talk I will share many experiences I have had with such problems. I will draw out the common factors that underpinned these difficulties, describing not only how they presented in code, but also the causes that led to them. I will introduce Holistic Engineering, the practice of designing tech thinking of all the intrinsic parts of the organic system, embracing how people, management, organizational structure, budgets, company goals, production vision, security and even the political climate impact directly your code. This talk will help you better understand the boundaries of the organic system you are making technical decisions for and apply strategies to incorporate technical and non-technical factors to your decision process for your ever evolving organic system.
Interview
Solving problems. I aim to evolve the system I am working on towards the best outcome we can realistically achieve, influencing or taking into consideration all the variables of the system: human, technical, organizational, relationships, culture and the point in time.
Seeing so many projects not achieve their potential successful outcome due to the lack of understanding of variables that are not technical.
Architects, Staff+ engineers, technical leaders and anyone in engineering or from a different department with the responsibility to make difficult decisions under real constraints.
To get over themselves and embrace the idea that in order to have the best project outcome and architecture you need to factor in your decision process a much larger set of variables than just the technical ones.
Ethical engineering. I think in the upcoming years we will focus a lot more on how the choices we make in software will impact the world around us at that point in time and in the future. In order to be able to do so, we need to embrace being part of a bigger system than our engineering department and work on solving problems holistically.
Topics
QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Wednesday 9 April
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