White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge: bring order to the whole. Through design. Composition. Tension. Balance. Light. And harmony. The opening lines of Sondheim's ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ were written with fine art and paintings in mind, but ring true for software engineering as well.
As Seurat created grand visions from tiny dots, so software solves huge problems one line at a time. Some parallels are obvious - the suggestion of ‘favor composition over inheritance springs to mind’ - but others take more reflection. This talk offers musings on each element, and links each back to the cornerstone so often neglected in the midst of design docs, specifications and linters: our shared humanity. What turns ‘good’ code into ‘great’ code? How subjective is this? How does it affect how libraries connect with their consumers, and how applications connect with their users?
At the end of this talk, you'll be left with more questions than answers - catalysts for your own thoughts on the nature of code and art, and for further discussion.
About the speaker
Jon Skeet is a Staff Software Engineer at Google, working in London to make Google Cloud Platform rock for C# developers. When he's not doing that, he enjoys stretching the rules of C# to breaking point, making date and time fun (or at least plausible) to work with in .NET, and posting on Stack Overflow.
