Presentation: "Software Naturalism - Embracing the Real Behind the Ideal"

Time: Wednesday 14:05 - 15:05

Location: Stanford

Abstract:

In the software development industry, we spend a lot of time talking about good design and not nearly enough time talking about design as it is practiced normally. Every code base bears the mark of thousands of micro and macro code design decisions. In the end these decisions give code bases form and the form that they culminate in is rarely what we call beautiful.

In this talk, Michael Feathers will outline the forces that lead to the sort of code we find in the industry and discuss how we might alter our notions of beauty in design in response to the bare facts about how our actions give code shape..

Michael Feathers, Author of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code"

Michael Feathers

Michael Feathers is a consultant with Object Mentor. He balances his time between working with, training and coaching various teams around the world.

Prior to joining Object Mentor, Michael designed a proprietary programming language and wrote a compiler for it, he also designed a large multi-platform class library and a framework for instrumentation control.  Publically, Michael developed Cppunit, the initial port of JUnit to C++, and FitCpp, a C++ port of the FIT integrated-test framework. Michael is also the author of the book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' (Prentice Hall 2004).

Twitter: @mfeathers