RUG::B

As a company grows, adopting new technologies becomes more complex, costly, and risky. But as developers we want to keep our skills up-to-date and work with the latest and hottest tools. So how can we effectively experiment with new technologies at work in a responsible way? This talk will recount the famously adversarial relationship between Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla, and from their story we will learn ways to balance and exploit the tension between the boring and the new, the familiar and the shiny, the safe and the unknown.

How should we think about performance in software? Why does it matter? What is "premature" optimization, and how can we know when an optimization is needed? This talk presents a first-principles based approach to performance through clarifying requirements and relating them back to optimization.