Did you feel that you need to debug your mind? Did your (or your colleague's) biases impact your decision-making? How to improve it? How do you reason about the reasoning?
Laïla Bougriâ shared with us practical thoughts and the results of their research backed by the history of her projects. She gave us the talk she gave as the keynote at NDC London 2024 as our webinar. You can watch the recording
What’s precisely on the talk? Let’s give voice to Laïla herself:
There’s a myriad of complexity involved in building systems. However, two decades in software engineering taught me what truly makes or breaks a system: decisions. It’s not the programming language, the data store, the deployment model, or [insert your favorite tech here]. It’s about the decisions made and the ripple effects they cause. We spend endless hours trying to keep up with the latest and greatest in an industry that sprints faster than a caffeinated cheetah... But how much time was invested in questioning, improving, or, essentially, debugging our thinking process?
How do you structure your decisions, and how do they affect the software you build? When suboptimal decisions occur, do you reflect on the decision-making process itself? I've spent the last few years debugging my decision-making thought process, placing breakpoints to inspect which assumptions got me here and what alternatives I may have missed. As a result, my thought process became much more structured and streamlined, leading to better-balanced decisions. Join me in this session to explore how critical thinking can transform our decision-making process and elevate the quality of the solutions we build for our users.
Laïla Bougriâ is a software engineer and solution architect with over 15 years of experience in the .NET space. She's a Microsoft Azure MVP and frequent speaker at conferences around the world. Currently, Laila is busy building NServiceBus at Particular Software and solving distributed riddles. When she's not immersed in code, Laila enjoys indulging in her favorite pastime - knitting! She finds that tangling the yarn into beautiful patterns helps untangle her thoughts.
In the invitation, I already wrote that Laïla is also one of my favourite speakers and this talk is on an unusual topic. Unusual because we’re not taking enough often time to slow down and reflect. We’re jumping directly into coding, we’re feeling busy, and then we end up with the solution and the project, which is a flop.
This talk gives good mental tools to reason and investigate and to do the sanity check BEFORE, which is a basis for evolutionary architecture and good enough design.
As always, after the talk, we had a nice Q&A during which Laïla shared additional heuristics. I’m really happy that Laïla agreed to join us and share her experience with us!
Check also for additional material and references for her talk, which are available in her repository.
Webinars:
#2 - Keep your streams short! Or how to model Event-Sourced systems efficiently
#6 - Alexey Zimarev - You don't need an Event Sourcing framework. Or do you?
#7 - Design and test Event-Driven projections and read models
#9 - Radek Maziarka - Modularization with Event Storming Process Level
#11 - Maciej "MJ" Jędrzejewski - Evolutionary Architecture: The What. The Why. The How.
#12 - Jeremy D. Miller: Simplify your architecture with Wolverine
#14 - Mateusz Jendza: Why Verified Credentials is the Future of Digital Identity!
#15 - Mário Bittencourt: Leveraging BPMN for Seamless Team Collaboration in Software Development
#16 - Papers We Love #1 - Sagas (Hector Garcia-Molina, Kenneth Salem)
#18 - Andrea Magnorsky: Introducing Bytesize Architecture Sessions!
#19 - Laïla Bougriâ: Debug your thinking
#20 - Papers We Love #2 - How do committees invent? (Melvin E. Conway)
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