How Complex Systems Taught Me To Fail

A propos

We live in a golden age of programming paradigms and frameworks, all promising correctness, reproducibility, and even provability. And yet anyone who ships production code will, on a long enough timeline, become a connoisseur of failure. This is doubly true in tech-for-good initiatives, where the true complex system is a constrained society that doesn’t care how polished your code is. In this talk, I remix Richard Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail into a tour of unintended consequences, questionable decisions (mostly mine), and lessons learned, forgotten, and learned again over 20 years of trying to make the world better with computers. I hope you’ll leave with fewer “root cause” fairy tales, more humane failure modes in life and work, and maybe a little less fear of pressing deploy on your dreams.

Conférenciers