Can Socrates teach you how to pair program? Do the methodologies of the German Idealism movement help solve complex engineering tasks? Could reading works by dead Frenchman with immaculate facial hair really help you be a better programmer? Part introduction to the philosophical tradition, part primer on engineering practice, this talk will present big philosophical ideas as common sense solutions to the daily tasks of Agile Engineers.

1. Applying Philosophy to
Engineering
Topher Bullock
@topherbullock
topher.bullock@xtremelabs.com
( how two seemingly different things you love
might complement each other in interesting and
useful ways )

2. Slavoj Zizek
"First As Tragedy, Then As Farce" (2009).
" When we are dealing with a truly
great philosopher the real question to
be raised concerns not what this
philosopher may still tell us, what he
may still mean to us, but rather the
opposite, namely, what we are, what
our contemporary situation might be, in
his eyes, how our epoch would appear
to his thought. "

3. " The Dialectic of the new and the old. "
" Analyze today through the
lenses of the past."

4. About
- Agile Engineer @ Xtreme Labs
- Work on Mobile Web / Hybrid products
- UWO/Fanshawe Media Theory & Production grad.

5. To become the leading provider of mobile
solutions to the world's most important
companies as we help drive a revolution in
computing.
Xtreme Labs : Mission

6. Pair Programming

7. ``

8. ``Logic : William of Occam

9. ¬( Q AND P ) ⇔ ( ¬Q OR ¬P )
De Morgan's laws
!( Q && P ) ⇔ ( !Q || !P)
If ConditionQ and ConditonP are not
simultaneously true.
It can be inferred that:
Either ConditionQ is not true or
ConditionP is not true.

10. If the blog post is not both saved and
valid.
It can be inferred that:
Either the post is invalid or it hasn't
been saved.

11. Occams Razor
" entities must not be multiplied beyond
necessity "
- Synthesis of Occam's insights on Logic
- Often (intentionally) over-simplified

12. " A difficult-to-believe, but optimized internal
dispatch function for triggering events. Tries
to keep the usual cases speedy (most internal
Backbone events have 3 arguments). "

13. DONE!

14. Code Epistemology : Plato

15. ' grok '
( pron :: /ɡrɒk/ )
" to understand profoundly and
intuitively "
" to intimately and completely share
the same reality or line of thinking
with another physical or conceptual
entity"

17. Design Patterns
Creational
Structural
Behavioral
" a general reusable solution to a
commonly occurring problem
within a given context "

18. Mediator Pattern
" encapsulates how a set of objects
interact. promotes loose coupling by
keeping objects from referring to each
other explicitly "

19. World of Forms

20. V8 : Hidden Classes

21. V8 : Hidden Classes

23. Observability
" Creators need to be able to see
what they're doing "
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

24. Debugging Ontology : Hume & Kant

25. David Hume

26. When events of one kind are immediately
followed by events of another kind.
Where, if there had been no object of the first
kind, we would never have seen an object of
the second kind.
Accounting for Causation

27. When an event or output is dependant on the
sequence or timing of other uncontrollable
events.
Race Conditions

28. Immanuel Kant

29. proposition whose justification does not rely
upon experience; can be validated by
experience, but is not grounded in it.
proposition whose justification relies on
experience; validated by, and grounded in,
experience.
a priori
a posteriori

30. " All bachelors are unmarried "
" 7 + 5 = 12"
a priori

31. " All bachelors are unhappy."
" Cats exist."
a posteriori
" Adding arrays gives you a string"
" Feature X doesn't work on iPad but works
in IE8"

32. " Being wrong doesn't feel like anything. "

33. Confirmation Bias
a tendency of people to favor
information that confirms their
beliefs or hypotheses

38. Agile Engineers as Authors

39. " Once the Author is gone, the claim to
' decipher ' a text becomes quite
useless. "
" To give an Author to a text is to
impose upon that text a stop clause, to
furnish it with a final signification "
Roland Barthes
"The Death of The Author" (1967).