Dan North

Keynote: Complexity is Outside the Code

Dan North

Keynote: Complexity is Outside the Code

We talk about code review, modularity of our software, smaller pieces of code, refactoring. Forget all that. The real complexity these days is outside the code. Small services are lovely to reason about internally, but they push complexity outward. And systems these days aren't so much written as assembled.

We write some code, our precious business logic, and then all the real work is hooking into everything else.
Databases, web servers, routers, monitoring systems, search tools. Plus the easy stuff like version control, issue trackers, continuous integration. Then there’s deployment.

Every piece both adds and takes away complexity. Every piece (well, of the good ones) is elegant inside but a disaster when we try to implement it without understanding its internal concepts, or when we use it for an unsuited purpose.
 
Join Jess and Dan on a journey through complexity. At the other side we may find simplicity, or we may find the light at the end of the tunnel is just another oncoming enterprise service bus.

 

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About Dan

Dan North uses his deep technical and organisational knowledge to help CIOs, business and software teams to deliver quickly and successfully. He puts people first and finds simple, pragmatic solutions to business and technical problems, often using lean and agile techniques. With over twenty years of experience in IT, Dan is a frequent speaker at technology conferences worldwide. The originator of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Deliberate Discovery, Dan has published feature articles in numerous software and business publications, and contributed to The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends and 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts. He occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.

Github: tastapod

Twitter: @tastapod

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