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Simon Stewart

Simon Stewart

Creator, Selenium WebDriver

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keynote session

The Complexity of Simplicity

About the Talk

We are living in a world of ever-increasing complexity. In a way, that's wonderful. Our applications are more capable and feature-rich than ever before. But in a way, that's terrible, because the more complex something is, the harder it is to build, and the harder it is to verify that it's working correctly. From the point of view of a developer or tester, this complexity typically translates into longer build and CI times -- we lengthen our feedback loops, making us less able to respond to change, new feature requests, and to land bug fixes. Given that we live in a world of software that is becoming more and more complex, what can we do about it?

In this talk, we'll address this question head-on, but we'll limit the scope to something practical: our production and test code, and our CI pipelines, with a focus on testability and fast feedback loops. You'll find that we have a choice about where to place complexity in a system, and we'll cover some of the strategies that can be used to tame the beast and bring some sense of order back to our lives. You'll find the old adage 'everything that's old is new again' can be applied even today, and we'll explore how looking at our basic assumptions with a fresh view of the world (and modern technology!) can lead us to a radically different way of structuring our CI runs.

Key Takeaways:

  • Fast feedback loops are important
  • We have a choice about where to place complexity in our systems
  • YAGNI, how it relates to simplicity, and how to apply it to our test frameworks
  • Part of the joy of using OSS software is that sometimes that can be the place where complexity lives (eg. Selenium made automating browsers far simpler, but the internal workings of Selenium are complex)
  • There's a new generation of build tooling that allows us to move complexity from our CI runs
  • Simplicity is a goal worth striving for

About the Speaker

Simon Stewart was the lead of the Selenium project for over a decade and is the co-editor of the W3C WebDriver and WebDriver Bidi specs. He's been a professional software developer since before the millennium began.

He led that build tool team at Facebook and is currently contributing to Bazel rulesets. Before joining Facebook, he spent almost five years at Google, and three at ThoughtWorks. Currently, he works for a large tech company, focusing on building tools and DX. He's seen a lot of code.

Simon has an interest in byte-for-byte reproducible builds at incredible speed, and lives in London with his family and dog.

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