Nomads do not build Cathedrals

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Title: Nomads do not build Cathedrals Speaker: Marcus Denker Thu, August 21, 2:00pm – 2:30pm Video Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcoy5gwUvOA Video Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LrH9r4FNzY Abstract: This will a rather unusual talk for ESUG. The theme is not Smalltalk directly, but instead I discuss how progress and inventing new things fits with incremental, reflective nature of Smalltalk. People often argue that progress is only possible when you throw everything away and start from scratch. In this talk I will argue that this thinking is a trap and the only way for progress in practice is to take an incremental approach of constantly improving and therefore evolving the imperfect system you already have. I will show how the idea of creating feedback loops of improvement actually lead to non-linear growth and how this process of reflective constant improvement fits with the Smalltalk philosophy of incrementally and dynamically changing a running system. Bio: Marcus Denker is a permanent researcher (CR1, with tenure) at INRIA Lille - Nord Europe. Before, he was a postdoc at the PLEIAD lab/DCC University of Chile and the Software Composition Group, University of Bern. His research focuses on reflection and meta-programming for dynamic languages. He is an active participant in the Squeak and Pharo open source communities for many years. Marcus Denker received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bern/Switzerland in 2008 and a Dipl.-Inform. (MSc) from the University of Karlsruhe/Germany in 2004. He is a member of ACM, GI, and IEEE and a board-member of ESUG.

Transcript of Nomads do not build Cathedrals

Nomads do not build CathedralsMarcus Denker http://www.marcusdenker.de

Software

Strange Talk…

No idea if it will work

The Platform

Jump to large

Proj

ect1

Proj

ect2

Proj

ect3

Nomadic Solution

- Do not build infrastructure !

- Use resources until depleted !

- Move on

The Platform

Jump Possible

Proj

ect1 Pr

ojec

t2

Proj

ect3

Proj

ect4

Better?

- Invest in infrastructure !

- Build new abstractions !

Feedback Loop

Projects Infrastructure

Feedback loop is not enough!!

Add until it is unmaintainable. Throw everything away.

Feedback loop is not enough!!!

After the first line of code you are in maintenance

Sustainable Feedback !!

- Constant Cleanup - Constant Improvement

To build a cathedral you need to build a toilet first

The toilet is not the cathedral

Yet there can not be a cathedral without building

a toilet first

Effects?

Perfection

Constant “in Progress”

Scaffolding

System is not an Artefact

Always a Result

…instead of dreaming of perfection

Trivial Changes

Every improvement has an effect

Starting point for contributors

Only trivialities?

No!

Exponential effect

Compound Interest

Scaffolding

Todays system is scaffolding for tomorrow

The whole system could be replaced within just some iterations