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

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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.

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