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Kevlin Henney

Kevlin Henney

CEO

Curbralan

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kevlin Henney is a independent consultant, trainer, technologist, writer and renowned keynote speaker known for his work helping organisations, teams and individuals with their software development practices, processes, architectures and the human side of development. With a career spanning decades, he has become one of the most respected voices in the global developer community, known for his deep insights into code quality and agile processes. A frequent keynote speaker at major international conferences, Kevlin is celebrated for his ability to challenge industry dogmas and his advocacy for 'lean code'. He is a contributor to the Modern Software Engineering YouTube channel, co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know, and has written for many other publications, including O'Reilly Radar and The Register.

TALK

Abstraction? You Keep Using that Word

Ask software architects, tech leads and developers what skills are valuable in developing software systems, and inevitably someone will say 'abstraction'. Ask how a system should be structured, and inevitably someone will say 'levels of abstraction'. Look at programming or modelling paradigms and — inevitably — 'abstract' will appear, as a noun, as a verb or as an adjective. Being so steeped in the terminology of abstractness and abstraction, you would be forgiven for thinking that software developers would have a clear and ready definition of what abstraction means. You would be forgiven, because you would be wrong. Although a foundation of much of computing and progress, developers have varied views on what it means for something to be abstract, often confusing 'abstraction' with 'generalisation', or being unclear about the relationship between 'abstractness' and 'level', or equating 'being abstract' with 'being vague'. In this talk we will look at what 'abstraction' means in theory and in practice. We will see how knowing this helps us to understand the relationship between abstraction and progress in software development in the past as well as its future. It also helps us to properly evaluate claims about AI and abstraction from the perspective of both developer and user.

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Gitte knows how combining human skills with good leadership skills is a necessity for an organisation to get stuff done. And getting the right stuff done. Her ability to align the individual well-being and growth together with company objectives is remarkable. One of Gitte’s key strengths is holding people accountable while fostering psychological safety.

Gitte has given talks and keynots at three continents, where she highlights and makes topics like mental health and psychological safety accessible. Other topics include courage, retrospectives, various agile topics, leadership, management, and her personal goal: bringing humanity back in the workplace.

Her community contributions include organizing coach camps for over a decade and actively engaging on social media. She creates safe and respectful environments at work and outside. She listens to and engages the more silent voices and minority groups. Gitte also contributes to the community by writing blogpost and on Bluesky as she shifted away from Twitter. She wrote a section about team safety in "The Art of Agile Development, 2. edition" by James Shore which was published in 2021.

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Speakers, program drops and much more of the community.

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© 2026 code.talks · alphalist GmbH · Hamburg

Let’s connect on LinkedIn.

Speakers, program drops and much more of the community.

A 2-day sweet spot conference for the entire dev team to stay future-proof in the age of AI.

© 2026 code.talks · alphalist GmbH · Hamburg