(pic taken and twitted from Dragoş Dreptate)
I had the chance to talk on what I consider “Applied Physics of Software” at ncrafts 2016 in Paris, where I presented “On Growth and Software” on may 12th. This is a short report on the experience; it’s a bit self-centered (sorry) and won’t say much about the other talks I’ve attended, but I still want to take the time to thank a few people: Romeu Moura (who invited me) and Peter Even were super-nice and handled all the travel arrangements swiftly. Cyrille Martraire was my local best friend :-) and even if I didn’t collect my conference bag of goodies (so no stickers!) he still got me the brilliant Arolla dice (they should probably set up a side business selling those on eBay or Amazon)
I had the chance to talk on what I consider “Applied Physics of Software” at ncrafts 2016 in Paris, where I presented “On Growth and Software” on may 12th. This is a short report on the experience; it’s a bit self-centered (sorry) and won’t say much about the other talks I’ve attended, but I still want to take the time to thank a few people: Romeu Moura (who invited me) and Peter Even were super-nice and handled all the travel arrangements swiftly. Cyrille Martraire was my local best friend :-) and even if I didn’t collect my conference bag of goodies (so no stickers!) he still got me the brilliant Arolla dice (they should probably set up a side business selling those on eBay or Amazon)
The entire staff ensured everything worked like a charm. Thanks guys :-).
A great chance to talk to people
This was hands-down the conference where I had more chances to chat with other speakers and attendees. We actually skipped a few talks as we kept talking, but as Rui Carvalho said in the opening speech, you can always find the videos on the internet in the end, so the real reason in going to a conference is your chance to exchange ideas with interesting people. I had a long conversation with Jérémie Chassaing, overdue and of course much more productive than short messages on twitter.
My talk
I could have done better on my talk - although I had of course rehearsed it, I was slower than expected. I just felt that I needed to stay on some concepts a little longer. On retrospect, I could have probably skipped some of the initial stuff about physical objects, or asked for a slightly longer time slot, or both. The bottom line is that I had to skip quite a few slides, which is never nice, but I do hope the overall message came through well enough.
There was a time slot for open sessions / unconference on day 2 (my talk was on day 1). I choose to take part in that (expecting to listen and watch) but Cyrille proposed “DDD and the Physics of Software” which got just enough votes that I got dragged :-) into talking more about PHOS in general. Cyrille also managed to grab Laurent Bossavit whose reservations about the entire approach I was in fact eager to know better.
Looking back
To be honest, I came back both happy to have done the talk and somewhat tempted to quit this work :-).
On one side, a few people were genuinely interested, and a couple of speakers even made a reference to my talk during theirs, which was nice, and felt almost as some concepts could have a chance to become mainstream [names of the speakers omitted to protect them from those who hate this idea with a passion :-)].
The conversations I had are definitely pushing me to write down some preliminary ideas on the notion of “flexibility”, which like many others in our field is being used to mean whatever we want at that moment, but I think could be characterized more precisely. While doing so, I could also take the chance to explain why I said that the growth model of our code should follow the growth model of our decisions (when we want what is normally called “ease of extension / contraction”), but also why the shape of our code itself should not be an exact mirror of the decision space (following a remark by Cyrille that if decisions and artifacts get somewhat isomorphic, it makes little sense to distinguish between the two; but in a departure from Alexander’s idea of form being in “frictionless contact” with context, the notion of “flexibility” should prove that we need some slack there).
On the other side, many comments seemed to point toward a general sentiment (also echoed in private emails etc.) that yeah, maybe, if this theory was complete, better, more quantitative / comprehensive / immediately applicable / to the point, then it would make sense to play with it, but given that the community has many other larger problems and is anyway happy going by the seat of its collective pants, and that I won’t be able to complete this work in my lifespan, and that even if I do it may turn out to be completely irrelevant (a risk that I have admitted to accept), well, I might be better off spending my time hiking instead.
My standard answer is that we already have a ton of quantitative metrics but nobody uses them, and that it also took some time for the theory of gravity to go from Aristotle to Galileo to Newton to Einstein, but every step was still useful and although imprecise, incorrect, and initially largely qualitative, even the early steps were probably necessary to build up enough awareness to inspire, support and challenge the next generation. But that’s just rationalizing the fact that I’m probably setting myself up for failure :-).
TL;DR
All the talking moved me to a higher position, yet also closer to precipice :-). I definitely need to take some time to process the feedback; I’ll see what comes out of it. The talk was recorded (but of course the unconference discussion wasn’t, so you just missed it). I’ll keep you guys posted when it gets available online.
A great chance to talk to people
This was hands-down the conference where I had more chances to chat with other speakers and attendees. We actually skipped a few talks as we kept talking, but as Rui Carvalho said in the opening speech, you can always find the videos on the internet in the end, so the real reason in going to a conference is your chance to exchange ideas with interesting people. I had a long conversation with Jérémie Chassaing, overdue and of course much more productive than short messages on twitter.
My talk
I could have done better on my talk - although I had of course rehearsed it, I was slower than expected. I just felt that I needed to stay on some concepts a little longer. On retrospect, I could have probably skipped some of the initial stuff about physical objects, or asked for a slightly longer time slot, or both. The bottom line is that I had to skip quite a few slides, which is never nice, but I do hope the overall message came through well enough.
There was a time slot for open sessions / unconference on day 2 (my talk was on day 1). I choose to take part in that (expecting to listen and watch) but Cyrille proposed “DDD and the Physics of Software” which got just enough votes that I got dragged :-) into talking more about PHOS in general. Cyrille also managed to grab Laurent Bossavit whose reservations about the entire approach I was in fact eager to know better.
Looking back
To be honest, I came back both happy to have done the talk and somewhat tempted to quit this work :-).
On one side, a few people were genuinely interested, and a couple of speakers even made a reference to my talk during theirs, which was nice, and felt almost as some concepts could have a chance to become mainstream [names of the speakers omitted to protect them from those who hate this idea with a passion :-)].
The conversations I had are definitely pushing me to write down some preliminary ideas on the notion of “flexibility”, which like many others in our field is being used to mean whatever we want at that moment, but I think could be characterized more precisely. While doing so, I could also take the chance to explain why I said that the growth model of our code should follow the growth model of our decisions (when we want what is normally called “ease of extension / contraction”), but also why the shape of our code itself should not be an exact mirror of the decision space (following a remark by Cyrille that if decisions and artifacts get somewhat isomorphic, it makes little sense to distinguish between the two; but in a departure from Alexander’s idea of form being in “frictionless contact” with context, the notion of “flexibility” should prove that we need some slack there).
On the other side, many comments seemed to point toward a general sentiment (also echoed in private emails etc.) that yeah, maybe, if this theory was complete, better, more quantitative / comprehensive / immediately applicable / to the point, then it would make sense to play with it, but given that the community has many other larger problems and is anyway happy going by the seat of its collective pants, and that I won’t be able to complete this work in my lifespan, and that even if I do it may turn out to be completely irrelevant (a risk that I have admitted to accept), well, I might be better off spending my time hiking instead.
My standard answer is that we already have a ton of quantitative metrics but nobody uses them, and that it also took some time for the theory of gravity to go from Aristotle to Galileo to Newton to Einstein, but every step was still useful and although imprecise, incorrect, and initially largely qualitative, even the early steps were probably necessary to build up enough awareness to inspire, support and challenge the next generation. But that’s just rationalizing the fact that I’m probably setting myself up for failure :-).
TL;DR
All the talking moved me to a higher position, yet also closer to precipice :-). I definitely need to take some time to process the feedback; I’ll see what comes out of it. The talk was recorded (but of course the unconference discussion wasn’t, so you just missed it). I’ll keep you guys posted when it gets available online.
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