Dave Thomas shared his wealth of experience through decades of development and technology work in various projects.

1. Ten Ways to Accelerate
Software Development
Dave Thomas
YOW! Nights HK
11 May 2017

5. Dave made a
comment that with
every release of
one of the products
he worked on, the
target is 15% less
code even with new
features.
Dave mentioned
Conway’s Law –
how the
organization is
organized will be
reflected in the
software and its
architecture.

7. Dave’s comment:
Writing code should be
the last resort. Vary
behavior with data and
flow.

8. This is the basics of creating an
environment to enable high
performance.

11. Create ranged
estimates (pessimistic,
optimistic, likely).
“Single point estimates
are for fools.”
Points are training
wheels. The business
estimates with time
and money.

12. 3 point estimates
create risk windows,
likely outcomes thus
increasing
predictability of
estimates.

15. Use low fidelity
prototypes to test and
iterate quickly.
High fidelity
prototypes are a
waste.

16. Architects who are
“post-code” (don’t
code) don’t provide
value.

17. Dave recommends
learning Erlang and the
OTP library as a way of
learning microservices
and distributed design.

18. If storing data in a
datalake, make sure its
in binary format. Text /
Json exponentionally
increase disk / network
/ cpu bandwidth
required to process and
slows down the system.
Use Structured binary
formats. Newer / better
than google protocol
buffers, etc.
“NoSQL won’t exist by
2020. SQL DBs already
support columnar data
and allows queries.”

20. Having all your
data in memory
solves many
problems. Don’t
need to cache,
process, etc.
New memory
technology allows
non-volative, high
quantity storage
(e.g. 1TB in
memory)

21. Vary behavior
through data rather
than implement
logic in code.

23. State machines are
underused. Simplifies
many issues with
distribution and
events if have well
defined state machine.

24. Use spreadsheet
concept to define
business rules, to be
interpreted and
executed.
Changes to system
don’t require code
changes, just data.

25. Kent Beck (Yes – the
founder of XP), rebuilt
that 100 dev project
with 2 people and
small talk (now ported
to java)

26. Create queryable
APIs, minimizes
need to create
many APIs.

29. Dave commented that if
you only remember one
thing from today’s
session, it’s Property
Based Testing.

33. My personal notes:
• General theme is to simplify
the issue before solving it.
• Find the simplest solutions, it
reduces complexity, less effort
to implement, easier to
maintain and generally higher
quality.
• Think data and flows first,
then code.
• Functional design (lambdas)
are able to solve problems
more simply than OO, for the
right kind of problems.
• Test automation should be 30-
50% of the code. What slows
down development is not
enough testing, testing is the
constraint.