A software conference that advocates for quality

https://bettersoftwareconference.com/

by leoncaet • 1 year ago

167 150 1 year ago

bettersoftwareconference.com

WeirderScience• 1 year ago

Looking forward to Casey Muratori's talk!

prisenco2• 1 year ago

When I saw the title of the conference I immediately thought of him so I'm not surprised he's headlining!

reactordev2• 1 year ago

Curious how they’ll balance the business needs of moving fast with AI vs quality because my agents aren’t that good. While it works, I’m often having to cleanup afterwards - slowing everything down. I was almost as fast when I had just basic intellisense.

Anyway, I’ll watch the twitch stream from across the pond.

lotyrin2• 1 year ago

They probably just manage to realize that being seen to be "moving fast with AI" simply isn't a goal unto itself, that it has to deliver something of value beyond itself.

Terr_• 1 year ago

Or at least "value" beyond that reaped by current investors unloading their shares onto "Greater Fool" buyers at high prices.

prisenco2• 1 year ago

We could be in a tortoise vs. hare situation... Unless we find ourselves back in the conditions of the 2010's again, thoughtfully building software to be high quality and high performance may win out in the long run over "move fast and break things."

ktallett2• 1 year ago

There are plenty of alternative software needs that do not need to be AI based nor do they need to change tactics due to the current obsession with AI.

reactordev2• 1 year ago

If you know of any that are in need of an engineer, let me know. Every single executive I’ve talked to in the last 4 years is all “How can I use AI with this?”

switchbak2• 1 year ago

Well, a couple years ago this stuff all sucked (well, a lot more). Yeah it's in many cases somewhat borderline now, but still - this is frickin magic compared to what I thought was possible just a little while ago.

My question is how far does it go - are the gains going to peter out, or does it keep going or even accelerate? Seems like one of the latter two thus far.

xyzzy123• 1 year ago

Yeah it's interesting, unless I lean hard on them, AI coding agents will tend to solve problems with a lot of "hedging" by splitting into cases or duplicating code. It is totally fine with infinity special cases and unless you push for it, they will solve most problems with special cases and not generalise or consolidate (gemini, claude code at least both seem to have this behaviour).

I feel like this comes about because it's the optimal strategy for doing robust one-shot "point fixes", but it comes at the cost of long-term codebase heath.

I have noticed this bias towards lots of duplication eventually creates a kind of "ai code soup" that you can only really "fix" or keep working on with AI from that point out.

With the right guidance and hints you can get it to refactor and generalise - and it does it well - but the default style definitely trends to "slop" in my experience so far.

zahlman• 1 year ago

To be fair, a lot of humans also have this problem.

ants_everywhere• 1 year ago

Curious how they’ll balance the business needs of moving fast with AI vs quality because my agents aren’t that good

I would guess the same way humans do.

Put brain in creative mode, bang out something that works

Put brain in rules compliance mode and tidy everything up.

Then send for code review.

bradly• 1 year ago

In DJB's paper on software quality he identifies actionable strategies for code quality and code security that were born out of frustration to sendmail's exploit after exploit. Very accessible and fun read: https://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf

I would expect this conf to expand on those types of concepts and strategies.

Suppafly2• 1 year ago

Curious how they’ll balance the business needs of moving fast with AI vs quality

Why would they need to do that? Is that even a goal or something that this conference is addressing at all?

wavemode• 1 year ago

The programming language in the background of this website appears to be Odin.

jeberle• 1 year ago

Bill Hall "Ginger Bill", the creator Odin, is a speaker on day 1.

rkagerer• 1 year ago

Where can you actually learn the substance of what this conference is about?

All I found is a Twitch tagline that reads "Software is getting worse. We're here to make it better."

Suppafly2• 1 year ago

The have a list of the presentations in the original link. That should at least give you some idea what they're going to talk about.

ravenstine2• 1 year ago

If only they could get Jonathan Blow to be a speaker.

throwawaymaths• 1 year ago

the logo is an unsettling convolution of the back orifice logo

ravenstine2• 1 year ago

Now that you mention it, I'll never see the symbol of the Galactic Empire the same way again.

xyst• 1 year ago

Seems like a waste of time to me, especially in this age of AI slop somehow passing as quality. Just another excuse to drink/network/party on company’s dime.

However, I would be interested in establishing a union for technologists across the nation. Drive quality from the bottom up, form local chapters, collectively bargain.

zx8080• 1 year ago

For a non-engineer (business) person the case "engineering quality vs move fast break things" sounds more like "slow & expensive VS fast". The choice is obvious.

no_wizard• 1 year ago

It’s not that at all though, the adage “slow down to speed up” applies, because high quality engineering will inevitably increase throughput in the long run.

Really that’s the core of it

hackable_sand• 1 year ago

It's more like "slow and expensive vs. fast and more expensive"

bGl2YW5j• 1 year ago

You should challenge this idea in your internal monologue. Learn a bit more about technology and how it's made. "Fast" in most cases most definitely does not equal cheap, especially over the long term.

userbinator2• 1 year ago

"How can you not have enough time to do it right, but enough time to do it twice?"

rewgs• 1 year ago

What a fantastic way of responding to/framing this.

gjadi2• 1 year ago

plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

kragen5• 1 year ago

I may be the only one who thought this, but this doesn't seem to be related to the fondly remembered Better Software Magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Software_Magazine

It seems to be socially associated with the Handmade Hero and Jon Blow Jai crowd, which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame. They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness.

swesour• 1 year ago

which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame

This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. How did you arrive at this conclusion?

They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness.

They're definitely very concerned about efficiency, but user experience? Are you referring to DevX? They definitely don't prize any kind of UX above correctness.

kragen5• 1 year ago

By reading their blog posts and watching their videos.

mustache_kimono4• 1 year ago

This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views.

IMHO this group's canonical lament was expressed by Mike Acton in his "Data-Oriented Design and C++" talk, where he asks: "...Then why does it take Word 2 seconds to start up?!"[0]. See also Muratori's bug reports which seem similar[1].

I think it is important to note, as the parent comment alludes, that these performance problems are real problems, but they are usually not correctness problems (for the counterpoint, see certain real time systems). To listen to Blow, who is actually developing a new programming language, it seems his issue with C++ is mostly about how it slows down his development speed, that is -- C++ compilers aren't fast enough, not the "correctness" of his software [2].

Blow has framed these same performance problems as problems in software "quality", but this term seems share the same misunderstanding as "correctness". And therefore seems to me like another equivocation.

Software quality, to me, is dependent on the domain. Blow, et. al, never discuss this fact. Their argument is more like -- what if all programmers were like John Carmack and Michael Abrash? Instead of recognizing software is an economic activity and certain marginal performance gains are often left on the table, because most programmers can't be John Carmack and Michael Abrash all the time.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkdpLSXUXHY

tsimionescu2• 1 year ago

From what I've seen, they are very much in a game developer mindset: you want to make a finished product for a specific use, you want that product to be very well received for your users, and you want it to run really fast on their hardware. When you're done with it, your next product will likely be 80% new code, so long term maintainabity is not a major concern.

And stability is important, but not critical - and the main way they want to achieve it is that errors should be very obvious so that they can be caught easily in manual testing. So C++ style UB is not great, since you may not always catch it, but crashing on reading a null pointer is great, since you'll easily see it during testing. Also, performance concerns trump correctness - paying a performance cost to get some safety (e.g. using array bounds access enforcement) is lazy design, why would you write out of bounds accesses in the first place?

imwally• 1 year ago

You would think a conference that advocates for quality software would have a better website.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

I hesitated mentioning it, thinking perhaps I was the only one who thought so. The twitch video failing to load, the static text on blurred background text video, the horizontal text scrolling on mobile, ...

GoblinSlayer3• 1 year ago

Text in video always sucks, but that's just how twitch coding sessions work.

burnt-resistor3• 1 year ago

I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time."

Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

intelVISA• 1 year ago

Aye, it never happens but it does sell a lot of books ;)

I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties?

Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-adjacent.

ozim4• 1 year ago

Just like all the fitness content.

Get couple shredded guys and gals to show off how fit they are so everyone feels guilty they are snacking past 8PM.

Sell another batch of “how to do pushups” followed by “how to do pushups vol.2” with “pushup pro this time even better”.

Where in the end normal people are not getting paid for getting shredded, they get paid for doing their stuff.

I just constantly feel like I am not a proper dev because I mostly skip unit tests - but on the other hand I built last 15 years couple of systems that worked and were bringing in value.

jackblemming• 1 year ago

It happens when an ex-engineer is in a leadership position. The results are good, but it’s typically a small part of having a successful company.

However, you should want to build quality software because building quality things is fulfilling. Unfortunately certain systems have made the worship of money the end all be all of human experience.

burnt-resistor3• 1 year ago

The cult of morbid wealth slithered into the minds of people who have little or no money yet see themselves as temporarily-embarrassed, future billionaires because they work at one of the corporations as a peon or see billionaires on TV.

rachofsunshine3• 1 year ago

It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job.

If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-even point is usually at a lower level of quality than engineers would like it to be. Leadership and engineering managers know this and behave accordingly.

jcgrillo• 1 year ago

While I agree with everything you've said, I think you might be making an assumption that quality costs time. In my experience this isn't the case, unless you're starting from a low quality codebase or working with low quality people. A high quality team can produce high quality software in less time than it takes a low quality team to produce low quality software meeting the same functional requirements.

The whole ballgame is making sure you have no low quality people on your team.

pydry3• 1 year ago

This is only true in certain contexts. Most of the time software quality is looked over not because it genuinely isnt important but simply because it's hard to perceive.

Ive watched many businesses appreciate the benefits of software quality (happy customers, few incidents, fast feature turnaround) without ascribing it to anything in particular.

Then, when it went away, they chalked up the problems to something else, throwing fixes at it which didnt work.

At no point in time did they accurately perceive what they had or what they lost, even at the point of bankruptcy.

Part of the problem is that the absence of bugs, incidents and delays just feels normal and part of the problem is most people are really bad at detecting second order effects and applying second order fixes. E.g. they think "another developer will fix it" or "devs just need to dedicate more time to manual QA".

Conversely, because it's so hard to see I think it can make a really good competitive moat.

astrobe_2• 1 year ago

Companies can sacrifice every thing for "time to market" - optimization, maintainability, security and safety even - but underestimate the costs of doing that. It is actually more a marketing choice than an economic choice.

One can be skeptical about the implied statement and leadership/management knows what it is doing beyond delivering at the (arbitrarily) set time. One definition of Quality is to satisfy a need entirely at the lowest cost in the shortest time, but more often that not, the last term gets 90% of the attention.

scrubs2• 1 year ago

The more systems it is (distributed databases, leader election, strong serialization, safety critical) the more so cheapest path looses.

Making a bug fix on jira or web page there's less to loose.

Tainnor2• 1 year ago

Few people who advocate for software quality want better software just because it's more aesthetically pleasing.

Often, we've worked on codebases that were nearly collapsing under their own weight, where adding even small features would take an inordinate amount of time, where most changes would have unintended consequences, where onboarding was incredibly hard, etc. And we've worked on other codebases where changing things was easy, so we know the difference.

Often, the business has no clue how to fix this because a) they're non-technical, b) we unfortunately have no consensus in the industry about what "good code" is, c) humans are much better at short-term than long-term thinking.

clayhacks• 1 year ago

As LLMs lower the cost of creating software, shouldn’t that change this equation? Perhaps we can be focusing on creating well done optimizations now to give more data to LLMs to have them do future optimizations on other projects. Of course you’d still eventually hit a lower bound on any returns at all, but it will be way lower than the pre-LLM era

burnt-resistor3• 1 year ago

It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job.

You made a reductive, declarative, omniscient value judgement that is patently false. Managers just want to have the right buzzwords, the biggest budgets, and the coolest projects. (We won't point out that they have pointy hair.)

jofzar• 1 year ago

A software conference that advocates for quality

I am going to keep saying this, if your main tagline/ethos is broken by your website you have failed.

* On mobile the topics are hidden without scroll over. You also can't read multiple of the topics without scrolling right as you read.

* The background is very distracting and disrupts readability.

* None of your speakers have links to their socials/what they are known for.

* > Who are the organizers? Sam, Sander and Charlie.

* * Ah yes, my favourite people.... At least hyperlink their socials.

brabel• 1 year ago

It bothers me that this is from Sweden, a most inclusive country, while being pretentiously exclusive. I live in Sweden and wouldn’t mind going to a small conference on my holidays, but unfortunately I can’t find the “charming town” where this is supposedly taking place nor know how to find Sam, Sander and Charlie.

gjadi2• 1 year ago

Physical attendance will be invite-only. Tickets will not be publicly available. Invitees will receive an attendee guide with further information.

supportengineer3• 1 year ago

I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control.

The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth.

The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test automation.

djaychela• 1 year ago

Was the end result better or worse for this? I'm not being facetious, I just can't get if you think it was a good idea!

supportengineer3• 1 year ago

The software was rock solid. There were very few surprises once deployed.

tsimionescu2• 1 year ago

The company I work for used to be organized like this a decade or so ago, and people who were around back then still tell horror stories that we all laugh about. Things like bug targets not being met leading to extreme bug ping-pong ("you didn't specify the phase of the moon when this crash on clicking Run reproduced, Needs Information", "this GUI control is misaligned, here are 5 bugs, one for each button that is not where it should be", endless hostile discussions on the severity of bugs and so on).

Sofwtare development and quality assurance should be tightly integrated and should work together on ensuring a good product. Passing builds over a wall of documentation is a recipe for disasters, not good quality software.

supportengineer3• 1 year ago

Everyone was in the same Bay Area office building and both teams talked to each other and ate lunch together and sat together

thecupisblue• 1 year ago

I've worked at one of those companies where software quality was paramount.

They did TDD for a long time, they wrote Clean Code™, they organised meetups, sponsored and went to conferences, they paid 8th Light consultants to come teach (this was actually worth it!) and sent people to Agile workshops and certificates.

At first, I was like "wow, I am in heaven".

About a year later, I noticed so much repetition and waste of time in the processes.

Code was at a point where we had a "usecase" that calls a "repository" that fetches a list of "ItemNetworkResponse" which then gets mapped into "Item" using "ItemNetworkResponseToItemMapper" and tests were written for every possible thing and path.

They had enterprise clients, were charging them nicely, paying developers nicely and pocketed extra money due to "safety buffers" added by both engineers, managers and sales people, basically doubling the length of any project for "safety".

The company kept to their "high dev standards" which meant spending way more time, and thus costing way more, than generic cookie-cutter agencies would cost for the same project.

This was great until every client wanted to save money.

The company shut down last year.

MoreQARespect• 1 year ago

It sounds like they were cargo culting ThoughtWorks.

ThoughtWorks and companies like them do work but theyre heavily reliant upon heavy duty sales. Delivery at high quality is necessary but not sufficient.

wolvesechoes• 1 year ago

From your description it looks like that company wasn't into quality but into chasing every fad of software industry.

GoblinSlayer3• 1 year ago

The interface documentation was the source of truth.

lol, fire business analysts and let tech writers do their job. Sounds like some kind of VC black company.

popularonion• 1 year ago

Every company I’ve seen that maintains a separate QA org chart, inevitably offshores the entire QA org to India or China, with predictable results.

In 2025 I think the only thing that makes sense is having SDETs embedded in development teams.

bravesoul2• 1 year ago

Where in Sweden is it happening?
In a charming small town

kilpikaarna• 1 year ago

This thing feels pretty weird to me. I'm guessing it's an attempt at organizing some sort of european Handmade event, and trying to keep it small.

But between the sparse website, invite-only and anonymous organizers, it just feels like it's emphasizing the reactionary vibes around the Handmade/casey/jblow sphere. Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything.

Glad to see they got Sweden's own Eskil Steenberg though. Tuning in for that at least.

kristoff_it• 1 year ago

That's pretty much what it is, it's a reaction to an implosion that happened last year in the Handmade Network related to the Handmade Seattle conference which caused the conference organizer and the community leads to go separate ways.

https://handmade.network/blog/p/8989-separating_from_handmad...

https://handmadecities.com/news/splitting-from-handmade-netw...

userbinator2• 1 year ago

Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything.

There's a reason web developers, and the ecosystem/community around them, are the butt of many jokes. I don't think it's at all surprising that the injection of identity politics into the software industry has had a negative effect on quality.

loktarogar• 1 year ago

I don't think it's at all surprising that the injection of identity politics into the software industry has had a negative effect on quality.

That's a pretty broad claim. This conference could be in response to a perceived negative effect on quality, but claiming that as a fact seems hard to back up to me

pydry3• 1 year ago

Ive noticed that some of these types tend to be well meaning young people (often girls) who are super excited to have scored a job doing developer outreach for $BIGTECH.

It's a clever political tactic coz a 50 year old white male middle manager at Microsoft trying to become a board member on an open source foundation would face a lot more hostility than a 20-something girl who pushes all of the diversity buttons.

It mirrors the rather successful marketing strategies for a string of movies including Ghostbusters movie and Barbie, among others. i.e. "There's a certain kind of person who doesnt like our latest corporate offering...". Who wants to be that person?

hnthrow90348765• 1 year ago

I don't think it's at all surprising that the injection of identity politics into the software industry has had a negative effect on quality.

If it had any effect, it would be negligible compared to offshoring and weak incentives.

woodpanel• 1 year ago

Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything

You write this like this is a bad thing.

I just came to a conference to learn some cool new tech, but instead got lectured about my transphobia, that my database is systemic discrimination and my HDD being named „slave“ means I burn crosses in my free time, even though I have zero family relations to anything America.

I mean this screams fun right from the get go.

elcapitan2• 1 year ago

Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything

This reads like "Oh some people are meeting, so this must actually be about ME".

fzeindl• 1 year ago

What is needed is more evidence based software engineering. Statistical methods applied to datasets correlating issue trackers with code ASTs to show us exactly which ways of coding are correlated with longer issue times, frequent bugs etc.

I sometimes wonder if there could be an optimal number of microservices. As far as I know no one has connected issue data to the number of microservices before. Maybe there‘s an optimal number like „8“ which leads to lower number of bugs and faster resolution times.

NohatCoder• 1 year ago

Depending on who you ask the answer is either "It depends completely on the task, and it is in any case much more important that you divide your application in the right places than exactly how many bits you end up with", or "1".

If you ask Amazon then the more the merrier, because the number of microservices is effectively a multiplier on the bill.

cushychicken6• 1 year ago

I think I’ve finally figured out just what is that annoys me about the “software quality” crowd.

Quality is a measurement. That’s how it works in hardware land, anyway. Product defects - and, crucially, their associated cost to the company - are quantified

Quality is not some abstract, feel good concept like “developer experience”. It’s a real, hard number of how much money the company loses to product defects.

Almost every professional software developer I’ve ever met is completely and vehemently opposed to any part of their workflow being quantified. It’s dismissed as “micromanagement” and “bean counting”.

Bruh. You can’t talk about quality with any seriousness while simultaneously refusing metrics. Those two points are antithetical to one another.

vodou• 1 year ago

Some thoughts regarding this:

1. It is partly because the typical metrics used for software development in big corporations (e.g., test coverage, cyclomatic complexity, etc) are such a snake oil. They are constantly misused and/or misinterpreted by management and because of that cause developers a lot of frustration.

2. Some developers see their craft as a form of art, or at least an activity for "expressing themselves" in an almost literary way. You can laugh at this, but I think it is a very humane way of thinking. We want to feel a deeper meaning and purpose in what we do. Antirez of redis fame have expressed something like this. [0]

3. Many of these programmers are working with games and graphics and they have a very distinct metric: FPS.

[0] https://blog.brachiosoft.com/en/posts/redis/

cushychicken6• 1 year ago

1. Totally agree that the field of software metrics is dominated by clueless or outright bad actors. I can say with complete certainty that I do not know the right way to measure software quality. All I know is that quality is handled as a metric in most hardware companies, not an abstract concept. When it’s talked about as such an ephemeral thing by software people, it strikes me as a bit disconnected to reality. (If I was going to try, I’d probably shoot for bugs per release version, or time from first spec to feature release.)

2. With respect: that’s a bit of an exceptionalist mindset. There’s nothing precious about software’s value to a business. It’s a vehicle to make money. That’s not to say craft isn’t important - it is, and it has tangible impacts to work. The point I’m making is that: my boss would laugh me out of the room if I told him “You can’t measure the quality of my electronics designs or my delivery process; it’s art.”

3. I’ve never heard of FPS but I’m very interested in learning more. Thanks for sharing the link.

Edit: oh ok duh yeah of course you could measure the frame rate of your graphics stack and get a metric for code quality. D’oh. Whoops. XD

satisfice3• 1 year ago

I notice you have not quantified any aspect of your opinion, here. Which is not surprising, since your opinion is unrelated to facts, science, experience, or wisdom.

Quality is not a "real, hard number" because such a thing would depend entirely on how you collect the data, what you count as data, and how you interpret the data. All of this is brimming with controversy, as you might know if you had read more than zero books about qualitative research, epistemology, the philosophy, history, or practice of science. I say "might" because of course, the number of books one reads is no measure of wisdom. It is one indicator of an interest to learn, though.

It would be nice if you had learned, in your years on Earth, that you can't talk about quality with any seriousness while simultaneously refusing to accept that quality is about people, relationships, and feelings. It's about risks and interpretations of risk.

Now, here is the part where I agree with you: quality is assessed, not measured. But that assessment is based on evidence, and one kind of evidence is stuff that can be usefully measured.

While there is no such thing as a "qualitometer," we should not be automatically opposed to measuring things that may help us and not hurt us.

cushychicken6• 1 year ago

I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this comment, apart from the fact that you’ve sure made a lot of assumptions about me and my experience.

Barrin922• 1 year ago

Quality is a measurement

No it isn't, as in it literally isn't. Quantification is the process of judging something numerically, objectively and in measurement. Qualification is just the opposite, judging something by its nature, essence or kind.

Software quality, like all kinds of quality, is always a subjective and experiential feature. Just like, when someone says, this piece of furniture is a high quality, handmade chair, in all likelihood they haven't performed a numerical analysis of the properties of the chair, they're expressing a subjective, direct sentiment.

The handmade movement in software, was exactly about this, putting focus on the personal, lived judgement of experienced practitioners as opposed to trying to quantify software by some objective metric, that's why individual people feature so heavily in it.

cushychicken6• 1 year ago

No it isn't, as in it literally isn't.

Yes, it is. It is a well known field in hardware development, and generally treated as a sub field of manufacturing engineering. It deals with things like testing, sampling, statistics of yield, and process improvement. If you’ve ever done a DFMEA, an 8D report, a Five Whys review, a sampling quality analysis, or a process map, you’ve used tools produced by this discipline.

That’s what I’m trying to tell you and everyone else reading this.

Software, as a profession, collectively talks about quality with all of the rigor of joint passing English majors sharing their favorite sections of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Quality has a meaning and a definition and a field of study attached to it. Semiconductors and large scale consumer product manufacturing wouldn’t exist as we know it without this.

__grob• 1 year ago

I know Berkeley Mono when I see it! My go-to terminal font for coming up on three years. Automatically gets me pumped about this conference.

satisfice3• 1 year ago

There is no indication I see from the website that anything about this conference relates to quality, specifically.

I don't see how anyone can be "for" quality and not talk about how quality can be assessed. Where are the talks about that?

aaronbasssett• 1 year ago

They don't advocate for diversity that's for sure

tsss• 1 year ago

Good for them.

alabhyajindal• 1 year ago

I hate talk titles of this form: "Most of your projects are stupid. Please make some actual games.". So annoying. I know it's not personal but I'm sure a better title exists for all talks that choose this form. Why do you have to insult the audience?

GoblinSlayer3• 1 year ago

For an actual game you need a great story or a great concept, and for that you need to be an artist, it's not just a problem of formalized business logic and correctness. How do I draw sprites? I can draw geometric sprites, but I can't draw artistic sprites. I can make maps, but what should be on those maps? How do I even music?

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

Sounds good, but unless it advocates for HR practices that retain talent, and corporate practices that incentivize Quality, it probably won't result in any changes.

Personal Quality Coding practices have been around for as long as software has been a thing. Way back when, Watts Humphrey, Steve McConnell, and Steve Maguire wrote books on how to maximize personal Quality. Many of their techniques still hold true, today.

But as long as there are bad people managers and short-sighted execs, you'll have shit quality; regardless of who does the work.

nyarlathotep_2• 1 year ago

Sounds good, but unless it advocates for HR practices that retain talent, and corporate practices that incentivize Quality, it probably won't result in any changes.

Overwhelming majority of companies have no interest in even approaching the idea of what that would mean.

"we need 7 years experience with Mulesoft and Kubernetes."

sure, yeah, whatever.

elcapitan2• 1 year ago

So far this has been great, Casey Muratori's talk about the history of OOP aspects of programming has been quite insightful. Will need to revisit when it's on YT.

jiehong• 1 year ago

I wish they had a better website, that's for sure.

Not even a section of where and when to find the talks offline.

mediumsmart• 1 year ago

We should have a framework for dysfunctional code so we can build those projects faster and ship before the competition.

kazinator• 1 year ago

A few people shooting the shit in some Swedish town will not amount to anything. It's a sneeze in a hurricane.

A software conference that advocates for quality

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