Thursday 2pm
10 useful web features you don’t know about, by Olivier Leplus (AWS) and Yohan Lasorsa (Microsoft)
Interesting presentation on the evolution process of the javascrit language.
As for the rest, I should have read the presentation better: the talk wasn’t for me.
Thursday 3pm
Defying entropy: rewriting applications or regaining control? Alexandre Jeambrun, Octo
A very good talk on the classic theme of our field: should we rewrite? Spoiler: no, not really. We all have to work on old (legacy) systems that are still useful because they’re in production.
Main ideas:
There are three types of complexity: complexity of the business (there’s nothing we can do about it), complexity of the technological layer used (it’s there, it won’t be easy to replace, there’s barely nothing we can do about it), accidental complexity (bad practices resulting from the emergency code fixes, replicated bad design, etc.). We can do something about it).
The entropy of systems is increasing, because people are changing, technology is changing, the environment is changing. No choice, it’s going to get more complex.
Dealing with human change: delegate, give people autonomy and decision-making power over an area, give the people involved space to develop their skills, make the team resilient (turnover is a non-event, people WILL leave), give people interesting things to do.
Coping with technological change: accepting that the design of the system must evolve continuously, that patterns will emerge from production. Have modular systems. Refactoring all the time, and delivering small increments in production.
(I didn’t notice the slides on changes in the environment, other than that it was important to focus on the parts of the system that are differentiating in the economic environment in which it is evolving).
My main takeaway is the need to read the article No Silver Bullet (1986, by Fred Brook).
Thursday 4pm
‘34% of our employees are women, come and join us, we’ll do things for you’, Anaïs Moulin, from Onepoint
A talk by a very young PO on positive discrimination policies in recruitment, placed in their historical context, and on their positive and negative effects as felt by those most affected. Feelings of injustice, imposter syndrome, etc.
In particular, Anaïs encourages people to express their doubts and questions and to make these processes visible, for example by questioning HR departments directly about them, while hoping that these policies will disappear as a result of a future and hoped-for change in mentality, which will make them no longer necessary.
Leave a Reply