Posts Tagged ‘NDCConferences’
[NDCOslo2024] Mirror, Mirror: LLMs and the Illusion of Humanity – Jodie Burchell
In the mesmerizing mirror maze of machine mimicry, where words weave worlds indistinguishable from wit, Jodie Burchell, JetBrains’ data science developer advocate, shatters the spell of sentience in large language models (LLMs). A PhD psychologist turned NLP pioneer, Jodie probes the psychological ploys that propel projections of personhood onto probabilistic parsers, dissecting claims from consciousness to cognition. Her inquiry, anchored in academia and augmented by anecdotes, advises acuity: LLMs as linguistic lenses, not living likenesses, harnessing their heft while heeding hallucinations.
Jodie greets with gratitude for her gritty slot, her hipster cred in pre-prompt NLP notwithstanding. LLMs’ 2022 blaze beguiles: why bestow brains on bytes when other oracles oblige? Her hypothesis: humanity’s hall of mirrors, where models mirror our mores, eliciting empathy from echoes.
Psychological Projections: Perceiving Personhood in Parsers
Humans, Jodie hazards, hallucinate humanity: anthropomorphism’s ancient artifice, from pets to puppets. LLMs lure with language’s liquidity—coherent confessions conjure companionship. She cites stochastic parrots: parleying patterns, not pondering profundities, yet plausibility persuades.
Extraordinary assertions abound: Blake Lemoine’s LaMDA “alive,” Google’s Gemini “godhead.” Jodie juxtaposes: sentience’s scaffold—selfhood, suffering—sans in silicon. Chalmers’ conundrum: consciousness connotes qualia, quanta qualms quell in qubits.
Levels of Luminescence: From Language to Luminary
DeepMind’s AGI arc: Level 1 chatbots converse convincingly; Level 2 reasons reactively; Level 3 innovates imaginatively. LLMs linger at 1-2, lacking Level 4’s abstraction or 5’s autonomy. Jodie jests: jackdaws in jester’s garb, juggling jargon sans judgment.
Illusions intensify: theory of mind’s mirage, where models “infer” intents from inferences. Yet, benchmarks belie: ARC’s abstraction stumps, BIG-bench’s breadth baffles—brilliance brittle beyond basics.
Perils of Projection: Phishing and Philosophical Pitfalls
Prompt injections prey: upstream overrides oust origins, birthing bogus bounties—”Amazon voucher via arcane URL.” Jodie demonstrates: innocuous inquiries infected, innocuousness inverted into inducements. Robustness rankles: rebuttals rebuffed, ruses reiterated.
Her remedy: recognize reflections—lossy compressions of lore, not luminous lives. Demystify to deploy: distill data, detect delusions, design defensively.
Dispelling the Delusion: Harnessing Heuristics Humanely
Jodie’s jeremiad: myths mislead, magnifying misuses—overreach in oracles, oversight in safeguards. Her horizon: LLMs as lucid lenses, amplifying analysis while acknowledging artifice.
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[NDCOslo2024] Kafka for .NET Developers – Ian Cooper
In the torrent of event-driven ecosystems, where streams supplant silos and resilience reigns, Ian Cooper, a polyglot architect and Brighter’s steward, demystifies Kafka for .NET artisans. As London’s #ldnug founder and a messaging maven, Ian unravels Kafka’s enigma—records, offsets, SerDes, schemas—from novice nods to nuanced integrations. His hour, a whirlwind of wisdom and wireframes, equips ensembles to embed Kafka as backbone, blending brokers with .NET’s breadth for robust, reactive realms.
Ian immerses immediately: Kafka, a distributed commit log, chronicles changes for consumption, contrasting queues’ ephemera. Born from LinkedIn’s logging ledger in 2011, it scaled to streams, spawning Connect for conduits and Flink for flows. Ian’s inflection: Kafka as nervous system, not notification nook—durable, disorderly, decentralized.
Unpacking the Pipeline: Kafka’s Primal Primitives
Kafka’s corpus: topics as ledgers, partitioned for parallelism, replicated for redundancy. Producers pen records—key-value payloads with headers—SerDes serializing strings or structs. Consumers cull via offsets, groups coordinating coordination, enabling elastic elasticity.
Ian illuminates inroads: Confluent’s Cloud for coddling, self-hosted for sovereignty. .NET’s ingress: Confluent.Kafka NuGet, crafting IProducer for publishes, IConsumer for pulls. His handler: await producer.ProduceAsync(topic, new Message {Key = key, Value = serialized}).
Schemas safeguard: registries register Avro or Protobuf, embedding IDs for evolution. Ian’s caveat: magic bytes mandate manual marshaling in .NET, yet compatibility curtails chaos.
Forging Flows: From Fundamentals to Flink Frontiers
Fundamentals flourish: idempotent producers preclude duplicates, transactions tether topics. Ian’s .NET nuance: transactions via BeginTransaction, committing confluences. Exactly-once semantics, once Java’s jewel, beckon .NET via Kafka Streams’ kin.
Connect catalyzes: sink sources to SQL, sources streams from files—redpanda’s kin for Kafka-less kinship. Flink forges further: stream processors paralleling data dances, yet .NET’s niche narrows to basics.
Ian’s interlude: brighter bridges, abstracting brokers for seamless swaps—Rabbit to Kafka—sans syntactic shifts.
Safeguarding Streams: Resilience and Realms
Resilience roots in replicas: in-sync sets (ISR) insure idempotence, unclean leader elections avert anarchy. Ian’s imperative: tune retention—time or tally—for traceability, not torrent.
His horizon: Kafka as canvas for CQRS, where commands commit, queries query—event sourcing’s engine.
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[NDCOslo2024] Decades in the Machine: Meaning and Purpose in Technology – David Whitney
As circuits chronicle careers spanning scores, David Whitney, Director of Architecture at New Day and a prolific purveyor of programming tomes, confronts the crossroads of craft and chronology. A confessed creator of code and children’s chronicles, David delves into the dialectic of drudgery and delight, navigating the nebulous nexus of necessity and narrative in tech’s turbulent tapestry. His homily, heartfelt and humorous, harvests hard-won harmonies for enduring in an ephemeral enterprise.
David divulges dread: a talk trepidation-tinged, yet tendered to temper existential echoes. He heralds the hustle’s hollowness—monetary machinations versus meaningful makings—imploring identities intact amid instability. From fledgling forays to seasoned sojourns, David’s dispatch distills decades: delight in doing, despite detours.
Identity in the Interface: Crafting Careers Amid Chaos
Tech’s tumult tests tenacity: layoffs loom, languages lapse, yet purpose persists. David decries the drift—coding’s call versus climbing’s cachet—urging anchors in avocations: open-source odysseys, personal projects that pulse with passion.
He honors the hustle’s hybrid: salaried sustenance sustains side quests, where whimsy weaves worth. David’s dictum: diversify delights—write, teach, tinker—to transmute tenure into tapestry, resilient against redundancies.
Harmony in the Hustle: Balancing Billable with Beloved
The eternal equipoise: paid pursuits versus private passions. David dissects dilemmas—overtime’s overreach, burnout’s brink—beseeching boundaries: billable by day, beloved by dusk. His heuristic: harvest joy in journeyman jobs, channeling competence to causes cherished.
Mentorship mirrors meaning: guiding greenhorns gleans gratification, reciprocity in retrospectives. David’s dawn: embrace evolution—roles recede, relevance renews through relentless reinvention.
Optimism’s Odyssey: Growing Through the Grind
David’s denouement: optimism as ordinance. Persevere with patience—code’s camaraderie conquers crises, colleagues’ kindness kindles kinship. His litany: listen to users, laugh in logs, love the labor—error messages as endearments, PRs as partnerships.
His poem’s plea: prioritize presence—headphones in hives, grace for novices, green tickets for givers. In machines’ maw, meaning manifests in making—mindful, magnanimous, merry.
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[NDCOslo2024] Accessibility by Everyone (and for Everyone) – Amy Kapernick
In an epoch where digital dominion dictates daily discourse, Amy Kapernick, a foremost accessibility advocate and consultant, issues an imperative: inclusivity as imperative, not afterthought. With a crusade rooted in user experience and universal design, Amy exposes the exclusions etched into everyday interfaces, advocating for architectures that accommodate all, from the able-bodied to the impaired. Her discourse, dynamic with demonstrations and data, democratizes accessibility, declaring it a collective charge that enriches existence universally.
Amy acknowledges her last-minute logistics—audio absent, yet ardor undimmed—yet plunges into profundity: technology’s ubiquity underscores urgency, as 1.2 billion with disabilities confront barriers baked into bytes. She shatters stereotypes: accessibility aids all—temporary tribulations like fractured limbs or fractured focus benefit from barrier-free builds.
Universal Usability: Beyond Barriers to Broader Benefits
Accessibility, Amy avows, amplifies agency: screen readers summon sightless surfers to seas of content, captions convey clarity amid clamor, alt text unveils visuals to the visionless. Her hierarchy of harmony: POUR principles—Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust—guide guardians toward grandeur.
Amy animates with audits: color contrasts calibrated for chromatic challenges, keyboard cascades for motor maladies, semantic structures for scanner scrutiny. Overlays, she ostracizes: ostensible panaceas that exacerbate, overriding user overrides and inviting incursions.
Collective Custodianship: Crafting Change Collaboratively
Everyone, Amy emphasizes, owns obligation: developers discern deficits, designers dream diversely, managers mandate metrics. Her mosaic: small strides—semantic tags, focus indicators—sum to seismic shifts, serving seniors, multitaskers, multilinguals.
Resources ripple: her repository at capesa11y.com, a cornucopia of checklists and courses, catalyzes competence. Amy’s axiom: inaccessibility isolates, accessibility integrates—elevating equity in an equitable ether.
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[NDCOslo2024] Get Old, Go Slow, Write Code! – Tobias Modig
In the inexorable march toward maturity within the software realm, where velocity often eclipses wisdom, Tobias Modig, a veteran developer and agile enthusiast, delivers a defiant ode to senescence and serenity. With decades of debugging and deployment under his belt, Tobias dismantles the dread of obsolescence, championing the virtues of deliberate deliberation over frenetic fervor. His manifesto, infused with humor and historical homage, reframes aging as an asset, urging seasoned coders to linger in their craft, cultivating depth that outlasts the dash of youth.
Tobias sets the stage with three audacious aims: extol the merits of maturation, extol the elegance of unhurried execution, and exhort eternal engagement with the keyboard. He concedes the tribulations of tenure—framework flux, fledgling fluency—yet counters with conviction: the elder’s edge lies in equanimity, a measured mastery that millennials might mistake for malaise. Drawing from personal peregrinations, Tobias recounts races against rookies, where haste harvested hazards, while patience polished prowess.
Embracing Maturity: The Gifts of Graying Grace
Aging, Tobias asserts, accrues acuity: accumulated anecdotes afford anticipation of anomalies, sparing the squad from snafus. He invokes the Peter Principle’s peril—that of ascending to incompetence—warning against the siren song of supervisory seclusion. Developers, he declares, thrive in trenches, where tactile troubleshooting trumps theoretical tenure. His anecdote: a mid-career pivot to management, marred by monotony, until a return to roots reignited rapture.
Deliberation distinguishes the doyenne: novices navigate novelties nimbly, yet veterans vet viability, averting avoidable adventures. Tobias’s tenet: slowness safeguards sustainability, yielding code that’s not just correct but crafted with care, comprehensible to cohorts centuries hence.
Deliberate Deliberation: The Delights of Dawdling Development
Haste, Tobias laments, harbors hubris: crammed calendars court catastrophe, as unforeseen exigencies eclipse equilibrium. He likens laden ledgers to jammed junctions—a single snag spawns stalemates. His remedy: infuse interstices—unallocated intervals for introspection, ideation, or intercession—transforming tension into tranquility.
This tempo tempers teams: slack spaces spawn serendipity, where neighboring novices nurture under seasoned scrutiny, sans overtime’s overhang. Tobias’s triumph: a project propelled by pauses, where prototypes pondered yielded paradigms that persisted, proving premeditation’s primacy.
Perpetual Pursuit: Coding as Continuum
Tobias’s triad culminates in commitment: code ceaselessly, defying the drift to desks. He bewails the “developer lifecycle”—from coder to curator to custodian—as a cul-de-sac of creativity. His exhortation: evade elevation, or equilibrate it with engagements that endure—pairing, mentoring, moonlighting.
His horizon: harness hoariness as hegemony, letting longevity lead, as the world whirls while wisdom waits.
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[NDCOslo2024] Develop AI Agents with Semantic Kernel – Jakob Ehn
In the vanguard of generative paradigms, where language models orchestrate outcomes autonomously, Jakob Ehn, a seasoned solutions architect at Atea, illuminates Semantic Kernel’s symphony. A Microsoft MVP with a penchant for Azure and AI, Jakob unveils this open-source orchestrator—born in Microsoft’s copilot crucible—as a conduit for infusing intelligence into imperatives. His tutorial, threaded with live enactments, empowers .NET denizens to conjure agents that deliberate, delegate, and deliver, transcending prompts to proactive pursuits.
Jakob ignites with LLMs’ leap: from GPT’s generative gloss to agentic autonomy, where kernels coordinate calls, chaining capabilities contextually. Semantic Kernel, polyglot and potent, abstracts APIs into plugins, planners plot paths, memories mint moments—crafting copilots that converse, compute, and conclude sans ceaseless coding.
Foundations of Fusion: Kernel Configurations and Plugins
Semantic Kernel’s scaffold: a kernel encapsulating services—embeddings, chat completions—interfacing IConnectors for OpenAI or Azure. Jakob blueprints: var builder = Kernel.CreateBuilder(); builder.AddAzureOpenAIChatCompletion(…), yielding a kernel primed for prompts.
Plugins propel: native .NET assemblies or OpenAPI schemas, exposing functions as facets. Jakob instantiates: a weather plugin with GetForecastAsync, invoked via kernel.InvokeAsync. Semantic functions, YAML-yielded, infuse prompts with placeholders: “Current weather in {location}?”—blending blueprints with brains.
Memories memorialize: volatile or vectorized, persisting precedents for pertinence. Jakob’s vector store—Chroma—embeds episodes, retrieving resonances via similarity searches, enriching responses with recency.
Planners and Agents: Autonomous Assemblies
Planners pioneer paths: Sequential, Stepwise, or Action—dissecting directives into doables. Jakob’s Action planner: given “Book a flight,” it inventories functions—search, reserve—sequencing sans stalemates. Handles, he highlights, hallucination hurdles, grounding goals in grapples.
Agents amplify: collaborative cohorts, each expert in ethos—developer drafts, organizer oversees. Jakob’s ensemble: a proposal pipeline, where agents iterate abstracts, incorporating critiques conversationally. Semantic functions script sagas: “Revise to {limit} words, include {term}”—looping lucidly.
His demo: a conference copilot, soliciting sessions, surfacing summaries—agents alchemizing APIs into anecdotes.
Horizons and Hurdles: Refinements and Realities
Jakob tempers triumph: kernels kindle complexity—prompt precision, plugin parity. Yet, prospects gleam: multi-modal melds, enterprise embeddings. His behest: experiment, embracing Semantic Kernel’s scaffold to sculpt sentient solutions.
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[NDCOslo2024] Smarter, Not Harder: Scaling Without Burning Out in an Always-More Landscape – Marion Løken
Amid the relentless crescendo of expectations—ever-expanding portfolios, dwindling headcounts—Marion Løken, a product manager at FINN.no, chronicles a odyssey of astute adaptation. As FINN merged with Nordic kin like Blocket and DBA, Marion’s lean cadre of four developers and a designer scaled offerings from Norwegian dealer portals to pan-Nordic private and financial forays, all while safeguarding sanity. Her manifesto: intelligence over intensity, leveraging toolchains and toolboxes to transmute toil into triumph, ensuring expansion exhilarates rather than exhausts.
Marion’s narrative unfolds against FINN’s tectonic shift: from solitary insight apps to embedded analytics across platforms, reinventing for diverse demographics. This “more with less” maelstrom, she concedes, could crush spirits, yet a smarter ethos—component curation, documentation dynamism—drove delight. By embracing mainstream stacks like Kotlin and Spring, augmented by FINN’s Podium toggles, her team doubled revenues annually, sans burnout’s bite.
Cultivating Resilience: Buffers Against Overload
Stress, Marion posits, stems from workload, control, and reward imbalances. Her buffers: processes fortify all facets—planning preempts panic, frequent releases reclaim rhythm. Culture cascades calm: transparent retrospectives temper tensions, fostering feedback loops that affirm agency.
Tools tame tasks: reusable libraries liberate from reinvention, Swagger’s specs streamline specs. Marion’s metric: fun’s stability, tracked longitudinally, underscores sustainability’s success. Her heuristic: under duress, deliberate—rethink routines, not redouble efforts.
Toolbox Transformation: From Niche to Nimble
FINN’s evolution eschewed esoterica for ubiquity: Kotlin supplanted Kotlin Multiplatform, OpenAPI supplanted bespoke bindings. Marion marvels at Podium’s prowess—feature flags flipping functionalities fleetly—enabling A/B artistry without architectural upheaval. Documentation, once dormant, danced dynamically via auto-generated APIs, accelerating assimilation for newcomers.
This pivot propelled progress: a pricing tool, inherited and iterated, burgeoned from parity to prowess, yielding fiscal fruits. Marion’s mantra: mainstream multiplicity multiplies might, marrying maturity with maneuverability.
Embedding Efficiency: Innovation Amid Integration
Embedding insights into journeys demanded deft design: component catalogs curbed custom code, promoting parity across portals. Marion’s lean legion—four coders, one crafter—conquered complexity through collaboration, cross-pollinating with Nordic nests.
Her horizon: stress as signal, prompting smarter strides. By buffering buffers, teams transcend thresholds, turning “always more” into ample achievement.
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[NDCOslo2024] Designing for Change with Vertical Slice Architecture – Chris Sainty
In the ever-shifting sands of software demands, where agility trumps rigidity and evolution outpaces stasis, Chris Sainty, a distinguished software architect and Microsoft MVP, advocates for a paradigm that embraces flux: Vertical Slice Architecture (VSA). With a wealth of experience in .NET ecosystems, Chris dissects the frailties of conventional layered paradigms, illuminating how VSA fosters adaptability, accelerates onboarding, and scales with success. His exposition, laced with pragmatic examples, challenges developers to reimagine structures that prioritize features over foundations, ensuring applications remain responsive to the inexorable tide of transformation.
Chris commences by lauding the endurance of layered architectures—presentation atop business logic atop data—yet probes their perils in contemporary contexts. As customer whims whirl and scaling surges demand swift pivots, layers ossify into obstacles, encumbering change with cross-tier tangles. VSA, conversely, carves applications into self-contained verticals—end-to-end features encapsulating all concerns—streamlining modifications and magnifying modularity. This feature-centric ethos, Chris argues, aligns with modern mandates: rapid iterations, effortless extensions, and intuitive ingress for new contributors.
Deconstructing Layers: Pitfalls of Traditional Tiering
Layered designs, Chris elucidates, excel in abstraction but falter in flux. Modifications ripple across strata—tweaking data access mandates presentation perturbations—breeding brittle bonds. Scaling amplifies agony: monolithic services swell, onboarding overwhelms with navigational nightmares. Chris recounts teams ensnared in “god classes,” where logic leeches into controllers, defying single-responsibility tenets.
VSA liberates by slicing vertically: each feature owns its orchestration, from input validation to persistence, minimizing interdependencies. In ASP.NET Core, MediatR handlers embody this, encapsulating requests with validators, mappers, and repositories. Chris demonstrates: a “Create Order” vertical integrates all facets sans layer leaks, easing evolution as requirements refine.
Trade-offs temper triumph: VSA risks redundancy in shared utilities, yet Chris counters with judicious extraction—domain entities for rules, infrastructure abstractions for emails—preserving purity without proliferation. His verdict: layers for legacy, VSA for vitality.
Embracing Verticals: Accelerating Agility and Onboarding
VSA’s virtues shine in speed: altering a feature confines chaos to its silo, slashing cycle times. Chris illustrates with e-commerce: updating checkout logic spans one slice, not sprawling services. Onboarding accelerates—newcomers grasp endpoints holistically, sans layer labyrinths—fostering faster fluency.
Scaling surges seamlessly: verticals deploy independently, microservices materialize modularly. Chris cautions misconceptions: VSA isn’t anarchy—tests tether slices, conventions coerce cohesion. In .NET, minimal APIs map verticals directly, ditching controllers for clarity.
His horizon: VSA as mindset, marrying DDD’s domains with feature focus, empowering teams to thrive amid tumult.
Navigating Nuances: Sharing Savvy and Strategic Choices
Code sharing, a VSA specter, resolves via domains: encapsulate business invariants—aggregates, entities—reusable across verticals, insulating infrastructure. Chris debunks duplication dogmas: external concerns like databases or notifications warrant abstraction, not replication, ensuring efficiency without entanglement.
Strategic selection: VSA suits volatile domains; layers linger in stable spheres. Chris’s compass: assess change cadence—frequent flux favors verticals.
Forging Forward: Building for the Inevitable
Chris’s capstone: architectures architect for alteration. VSA, with its slice-centric simplicity, equips ensembles to navigate novelty, nurturing nimble, navigable codebases that celebrate change.
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[NDCOslo2024] Domain-Driven Design in Practice: How to Draw Your Domain Boundaries IRL – Vilde Opsal
In the dynamic crucible of organizational transformation, where business and technology converge, Vilde Opsal, an architect at FINN.no, narrates a saga of redrawing domain boundaries amidst a Nordic merger. As FINN.no and Schibsted Nordic Marketplaces shifted from horizontal silos to vertical units, Vilde orchestrated a domain-driven design (DDD) odyssey, harmonizing legacy maps with new strategies. Her case study, vibrant with real-world trials, illuminates how to craft domain boundaries that evolve with stakeholders, blending art, agility, and audience empathy.
Vilde frames her talk as a TV show, casting herself as the architect alongside product leads, developers, and a “big boss.” FINN.no’s reorganization—merging four marketplaces into a Nordic entity—demanded a new domain map to support independent verticals. Her mission: align historical domains, new teams, and strategic shifts, ensuring boundaries serve both immediate needs and long-term visions.
Crafting the Canvas: Principles of Domain-Driven Design
DDD, Vilde asserts, is an art, not a science. She begins with core tenets: domains as cohesive problem spaces, bounded contexts as clear partitions. At FINN.no, legacy boundaries—tied to functional areas like payments or listings—clashed with vertical ambitions. Her approach: engage stakeholders collaboratively, mapping domains via workshops that blend business goals with technical realities.
Vilde’s toolkit includes event storming, visualizing user journeys to delineate domains. For instance, real estate verticals prioritized distinct user journeys, while cars focused on transactional flows. This divergence necessitated tailored boundaries, ensuring each vertical’s autonomy while maintaining shared services like authentication.
Adapting to Audiences: Evolving Boundaries Over Time
Boundaries evolve, Vilde notes, as teams and goals shift. Early in the merger, real estate teams preserved legacy setups, minimizing disruption, while car verticals embraced user-centric journeys. She experimented with visualizations—temperature gauges, tables—to communicate progress, finding simplicity trumped flair. A table, mapping current versus aspirational states, resonated most, aligning diverse stakeholders.
Her insight: meet audiences where they are. Developers craved technical granularity; executives sought strategic clarity. By tailoring visualizations—diagrams for tech, narratives for business—Vilde bridged divides, ensuring domain maps clicked and stuck.
Balancing Pragmatism and Vision: Iterative Refinement
Pragmatism guided FINN.no’s journey. One vertical, pressed for time, made local decisions, deferring holistic reviews. Another, post-transformation, leaned on jobs-to-be-done, aligning domains to user needs. Vilde’s lesson: flexibility fosters progress. Iterative refinements, validated through experiments, ensured boundaries adapted to new stakeholders, like Nordic partners.
Her capstone: DDD thrives on dialogue. By fostering continuous feedback—workshops, retrospectives—teams co-create boundaries, balancing agility with coherence.
Embracing the Art: Making Domains Click
Vilde’s finale underscores DDD’s artistry: no universal blueprint exists. Success lies in experimentation, stakeholder alignment, and persistent iteration. Her challenge: craft domains that resonate, guiding teams from chaos to clarity with empathy and precision.
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[NDCOslo2024] Reusable Ideas About the Reuse of Software – Audun Fauchald Strand & Trond Arve Wasskog
In the sprawling digital expanse of Norway’s welfare agency, NAV, where 143 million lines of code burgeon, Audun Fauchald Strand and Trond Arve Wasskog, principal engineers, confront the Sisyphean challenge of maintenance. Their discourse, a clarion call for strategic reuse, dissects NAV’s labyrinthine codebase, advocating for shared components to curb redundancy. With a nod to domain-driven design and Conway’s Law, Audun and Trond weave a narrative of organizational alignment, technical finesse, and cultural recalibration, urging a shift from ad-hoc replication to deliberate commonality.
NAV, serving Norway’s social safety net, grapples with legacy sprawl. Audun and Trond, seasoned navigators of this terrain, challenge the mantra “reuse should be discovered, not designed.” Their thesis: intentional reuse, underpinned by product thinking, demands ownership, incentives, and architecture harmonized with organizational contours. From open-source libraries to shared services, they map a spectrum of reuse, balancing technical feasibility with social dynamics.
Redefining Reuse: From Code to Culture
Reuse begins with understanding context. Audun outlines NAV’s scale: thousands of developers, hundreds of teams, and a codebase ballooning through modernization. Copy-pasting code—tempting for speed—breeds technical debt. Instead, they champion shared libraries and services, like payment gateways or journaling systems, already reused across NAV’s ecosystem. Open-source, they note, exemplifies external success; internally, however, reuse falters without clear ownership.
Trond delves into Conway’s Law: systems mirror organizational structures. NAV’s fragmented teams spawn siloed solutions unless guided by unified governance. Their solution: designate component owners, aligning incentives to prioritize maintenance over novelty. A payment service, reused across domains, exemplifies success, reducing duplication while enhancing reliability.
Technical Tactics and Organizational Orchestration
Technically, reuse demands robust infrastructure. Audun advocates platforms—centralized APIs, standardized pipelines—to streamline integration. Shared libraries, versioned meticulously, prevent divergence, while microservices enable modular reuse. Yet, technical prowess alone suffices not; social engineering is paramount. Trond emphasizes cross-team collaboration, ensuring components like letter-sending services are maintained by dedicated squads, not orphaned.
Their lesson: reuse is a socio-technical dance. Without organizational buy-in—financing, accountability, clear roles—components decay. NAV’s pivot to product-oriented teams, guided by domain-driven design, fosters reusable assets, aligning technical solutions with business imperatives.
Navigating Pitfalls: Ownership and Maintenance
The core challenge lies in the “blue box”—NAV’s monolithic systems. Audun and Trond dissect failures: reused components falter when unowned, leading to outages or obsolescence. Their antidote: explicit ownership models, where teams steward components, supported by funding and metrics. They cite successes—journaling services, payment APIs—where ownership ensures longevity.
Their vision: an internal open-source ethos, where teams contribute to and consume shared assets, mirrored by external triumphs like Kubernetes. By realigning incentives, NAV aims to transform reuse from serendipity to strategy, reducing code bloat while accelerating delivery.
Fostering a Reuse-First Mindset
Audun and Trond conclude with a cultural clarion: reuse thrives on intentionality. Teams must evaluate trade-offs—forking versus libraries, services versus platforms—within their context. Their call to action: join NAV’s mission, where reuse reshapes welfare delivery, blending technical rigor with societal impact.