Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, trainer, speaker and writer. His development interests and work with companies covers programming, practice and people. He has contributed to open- and closed-source codebases (sometimes unintentionally), been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites and has been on far too many committees (it has been said that "a committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled"). He is co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know.
Software development can't all be fun and games, but how much fun do we not have by assuming that fun is something that happens in the future, after we've finished a task, a sprint, a major release...? How much joy is absent from out future work by the decisions we take today? How much is already absent from decisions made by others? It is a cliché that the journey matters more than the destination, but the deeper truth is that the journey is the destination. Software is never truly done, one release is followed by work on the next, and so on. How do we enjoy what we do and what we have on a daily basis?
This keynote will take a look at our passions, our frustrations, our myths, our realities and our relationship with our tech and our practices with a view to creating a more enjoyable here and now.
We are surrounded by failure. Everywhere we look — our browsers, our phones, supermarket checkouts, advertising billboards, airport timetables — there's often a display showing a broken configuration, a bootup sequence or the blue screen of death. And sometimes the failure is bigger than what we see — just think of CrowdStrike.
As software professionals we need to ask what we can learn from these failures. What simple techniques can we apply to reduce the probability that something will go wrong?
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