Time: 16:30 - 17:20

Room: Stokerij

Abstract

When you are coding, do you ever have the sense that perhaps something is missing? While most of us code for the love of it, there are always those times that you succumb to compromise, but is that really a bad thing?

When I was asked to give this talk, I accepted based mostly on the title of the conference. Other technical conferences tend to name specific technical goals in their titles, or else target themselves to a specific field, language or community. What captured my imagination about the Joy of Coding is that title, and the question that goes with it. What is it about coding that gives us joy? What more noble pursuit can there be than enjoying our work at the same time we derive pride from it?

Perhaps those times that you feel slightly less than fulfilled, the answer you seek is not a technical one, but a philosophical one.

In seeking the very latest ways to improve your skills and abilities as a creator of code, instead of looking forwards, we might learn something by looking back. Back around 530 BC, a man called Lao-Tzu (or Laozi, both of which are actually inaccurate translations of the real thing) wrote a book of just 5000 chinese characters in around 81 verses, providing insight that is still valuable today. To put that into our terms, perhaps we would compare it to 5000 lines of code in 81 source files that are still relevant and useful more than 2500 years after they were written down, having been ported to numerous new systems along the way.

In this talk, I will select some of the expressions from this amazing feat of engineering, and look at what we might learn from them in order to improve our own skills and attitude towards software development. We might even have a few laughs along the way.