Member since 1 year
Software developer, designer, architect, QA, team lead, critic.
Software systems are complex, both in the everyday sense, and in the more technical sense used by complexity science. This suggests reasons why agile software development and design are effective, including the usefulness of human feedback and of reducing localised complexity in code. We also have an agile idea, from Peter Naur, that a large part of programming is building and improving a model of the system in the programmer’s head. What does that imply about the world, or at least, the worldview of an effective programmer? This talk argues that software is a complex system and introduces William Wimsatt’s ideas of “causal thickets” and “ontological slime” as tools of navigation and classification for the working software developer.
