Back to Basics: Why the principles that built our industry still matter today

Looking ahead to next year, I want to talk about Abstraction, Encapsulation, Cohesion and Loose Coupling as it seems they are missing from a lot of modern software design.

Back to Basics: Why the principles that built our industry still matter today

There are only three things certain in life: death, taxes, and constant change in software.

For decades, we’ve tried to limit that change. Up‑front design and predictive methodologies promised control, but too often delivered the wrong software for the user.

In the late 90s, Kent Beck urged us to embrace change through methodologies like Extreme Programming and concrete practices such as Test‑Driven Development. These weren’t trends, they were reminders of fundamentals we already knew.

Design behind interfaces. Keep responsibilities narrow. Make dependencies replaceable.

These boundaries matter, from functions and classes to services, systems, and infrastructure. These ideas have been with us since the 60s and 70s. The challenge isn’t invention, it’s remembering to apply them all the time and everywhere.

We can’t do much about death or taxes, but we can remember how to make software easier to change.

Attend this session to rediscover the timeless principles that make software resilient. You’ll leave with practical reminders you can apply immediately, so your systems evolve gracefully, no matter what the future throws at them.

Motivation

Modern software teams often talk fluently about delivery, scale, and velocity, yet struggle to consistently apply basic design concepts that manage change.

The result is not a lack of progress, but a quiet erosion of engineering fundamentals. This talk aims to make those principles explicit again, relevant again, and usable at every level of a system, from top to bottom.

Comments

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

I, Robot

The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog