ALL SPEAKERS
AT A GLANCE
Role
CEO
Organisation
Curbralan
Category
Hero
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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