Speaker presentation: Kevlin Henney

About Kevlin

Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, speaker and writer. His development interests and work with companies cover programming, practice and people. He has contributed to open- and closed-source codebases, been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites, and 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").

Kevlin is also 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.

Get to know Kevlin even more at kevlin.tel or on his LinkedIn page.

The talk: Ye Cannae Change the Laws of Physics

Software is executable fiction. Software development is about constructing narratives, drawing from a broad palette of paradigms and technologies, married to our understanding of the needs and wants for a system. Abstraction allows us to simplify and reify the complexity of the world into a formal description that we continually update. Abstraction allows us to ignore things about the world and about computer systems that are irrelevant or inconvenient.

But there are limits to the enchantment of code and our ability to maintain illusions. When the rubber hits the road and the packet hits the network we find universal limits are there to keep it real. Nothing can be instantaneous or infinite. Not all computations can be reversed. Not everything is computable. Not everything can be known. Every computation costs time and energy.

In this talk we'll explore the metaphors and realities of the physical world and how they play out in our software systems.

Why I look forward to this talk

The first time I met Kevlin was back in 2003. I was at the JAOO conference (nowadays GOTO) in Århus and Martin Fowler introduced me to him. I think Martin said that Kevlin had been one of the key people in the pattern movement.

During the 20+ years after that, I’ve kept running into Kevlin. The "worst” time was in Trondheim, where he was giving a fantastic presentation. Unfortunately, it was just before my slot. Ouch, following an amazing speaker is… not the best setup if you’re average. :)

KevlinHenney has even become a noun, meaning a photo taken of a blue screen of death (BSOD) or similar in a public situation. I was about to get a KevlinHenney in an elevator in Stockholm a few months ago. The advertisement screen (not the control system screen, fortunately) showed a system crash. However, I got hesitant when it said something about CCCP as the name of the executable…

How Kevlin is always coming up with such interesting things to write and talk about is a mystery to me. But somehow he’s done it again, and I’m so looking forward to his talk at myConf!

/Jimmy, co-founder, CEO and consultant at factor10

Why I look forward to this talk

I first met Kevlin at the Craft Conference in Budapest in 2022. Chronologically, I guess we first met at the speakers' dinner the day before, but the first time we had a proper conversation was after his keynote about non-functional programming. I recall it featuring a lot of Rust examples, which always gets my attention.

Kevlin is that special kind of person who sits at the intersection of great wordsmithing, deep knowledge and captivating charisma. His writings are usually both interesting and entertaining, regardless of whether he writes about esoteric subjects, like less useful sorting algorithms, or more mundane stuff, like how we develop our software. His talks have all the same qualities, with the added bonus of having Kevlin there to explain it to you in person!

I have no doubts that Kevlin will captivate us at myConf, which is why I am very much looking forward to his talk!

/Raniz, consultant at factor10