Bertrand Delacretaz
12 - 13 March 2025 | Alte Kaserne Winterthur
Principal Scientist, Adobe - Former Board Member, Apache Software Foundation
Bertrand Delacretaz works as a Principal Scientist for Adobe in Basel, Switzerland, on large-scale content management systems. He's also an active member of the Apache Software Foundation and has served on its Board of Directors for fourteen years.
Talk
The Power of Simplicity: Crafting Durable Software Systems
Simplicity often takes a back seat in software engineering. Yet, it's absolutely key for creating durable and efficient systems.
Crafting simple software is hard and takes lots of efforts. It's about setting a high bar and persisting until the simplest solution emerges, which you can often tell by its beauty and efficiency.
This talk is based on more than twenty five years of software engineering experience, where the goal of essential simplicity has been reached in a few key projects. Digital audio recording, weather data management, interactive video kiosks, web app frameworks, the domains in which this happened are varied but a set of patterns emerges, that allowed us to reach high goals in terms of simplicity and efficiency in these projects.
There's no magic formula for simplicity, but our real-world examples will help you discover principles and a philosophy of simplicity that will help on your own journey.