Software Organisms

Abstract

Paradigm shifts are easy to recognize in hindsight. The trick is recognizing them in their early stages. Evolution, even in software, tends towards an equilibrium until something dramatically better comes along to disrupt that balance. This talk compares past "software regime changes" (i.e. epochal design disruptions) to the new abstraction that's at the heart of Temporal, with analogies to the evolution of life. You will come away with knowledge about how this abstraction will reshape the ecosystem and change how you design and build software, and with a clear vision of the future of Durable Execution.

About the Presenter

My career has followed a bit of a winding road. I started out in the financial markets: Risk Management for a major financial market clearing firm; partner in an Algorithmic Trading company; founder/owner of a hedge fund; president of a German Bank.

Then back to my roots as a software engineer developing low-latency, high-volume proprietary trading systems. I moved over to Web 1.0 as Amazon's first Sr. Principal engineer where I led a team building to replace the existing (monolithic) website architecture with one of the earliest Services-Oriented Architectures for a large-scale website. Also designed/wrote Amazon's RPC framework, standard service application framework, source code repository, build system, and a few other things.

On to Google, where I designed and led a team in the building of Millwheel, one of the earliest high-scale continuous computation frameworks, and finally now a Principal Engineer at Temporal Technologies, where we are building the foundation of a comprehensive set of tools for Cloud Applications.