Bill Berry on No Silver Bullet

Los Angeles - January 27, 2016

Bill Berry on No Silver Bullet

Description

Some thirty years after Turing Award winner Fred Brooks’ seminal work No Silver Bullet was published, the industry has paved over his enthusiastic skepticism, with an air of pessimism and apathy. After tearing down the failed software development methodologies of our predecessors, I will leverage Brooks’ work to frame a critique of current industry themes such as DevOps, Microservices, and Cloud Computing. Lest however, you be consumed by an unshakable hopelessness that, as an industry, we are bound to Santayana’s Sisyphean prophesy (‘those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it’), I will show that Brooks’ theories are alive, well and in fact thriving in niche communities paving our way forward.

Bio

In a previous life, Bill crafted scenery for Broadway, a la Pirates of Penzance, but now crafts software for the enterprise, a la Pirates of Silicon Valley. In his roles as Technical Lead and Application Architect for The Retail Equation, Bill has lead service integrations with Fortune 500 retailers, curated DevOps initiatives and always enjoys building high performance, multi-tenant distributed data APIs. As a deeply curious engineer, he enjoys pairing complex problems with simple and elegant solutions. Striving for meaningful change, Bill believes that cultural and technical progress is best made through evolution and not revolution.


Dollar Shave Club The Los Angeles Chapter would like to give special thanks to Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring the January meetup.