Wednesday
Room 5
10:20 - 11:20
(UTC+11)
Talk (60 min)
Mayday! Software lessons from aviation disasters.
What can aviation teach us about software? More acutely, what can aviation disasters teach us? Aviation is an industry that has committed to relentlessly learning from its mistakes, in the name of making the skies safer. Where the cost of the next iteration is potentially counted in human lives, then that relentlessness is not seen as a noble commitment but rather as the bare minimum. As software professionals, we have it easy. The costs of our decisions and failures are far far lower. For now.
As software permeates ever wider through our lives, the cost of failure gets higher. Societies are becoming cashless, and doctors are carrying a different kind of tablet. Smart phones have led us to smart homes. In a world where everything is connected, it’s time to learn from the industries where disasters are avoided at all costs. And in the face of disaster, instinctively running toward scrutiny rather than away from it.
This talk is not doom and gloom. It is a practical look at the methods and insights that almost 100 years of investigating commercial aviation disasters can teach us as software engineers.
Adele Carpenter
Adele is a software engineer at Trifork Amsterdam, where she is working on backend systems for the educational sector. Most of her work day is spent in the JVM/Spring ecosystems. Adele got the coding bug later in life but since then has been making up for lost time, going from command line noob to employed software engineer in just one year. Her experiences both in and out of tech have given her a unique perspective on the art of programming together with humans, which she hopes is useful to other humans who program with humans.