Presentation: "Qualities of great code"

Time: Wednesday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Olympic

Abstract: If you asked ten people for an example of what they think is great code you'd probably get ten very different answers. Some people care about performance. Others dexterity. Others simplicity. Different problems call for a different set of concerns, and different sensibilities frame the same problem in different ways. But are there universal laws governing what makes a given piece of code great? What objective criteria do we have to evaluate the quality of software? What are some of the questions we can ask beyond "do the tests pass"? From a deep interest in better understanding what makes some software great and what makes other software not as great, this talk will borrow from architecture, philosophy, linguistics and art to find techniques for identifying how to build something timeless and enduring.

Marcel Molina Jr, InfoEther

 Marcel  Molina Jr Marcel Molina Jr. is a language enthusiast who went from being a lit theory major to a programmer. Marcel's main interests include language design, software design and a cross-disciplinary approach to building systems. He strives to build beautiful software. After spending 4 years as a core developer on the Rails framework, and even more years in the Ruby community, lately he's been working on the iPhone platform, and has written a book on it, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. He works for InfoEther (http://infoether.com) and maintains a web presence at Projectionist (http://project.ioni.st).