!!Con West 2019 - Michael Arntzenius: Software patterns … from the 9th century?!!
Channel: !!Con
Date: 25/03/2019

Presented at !!Con West 2019: http://bangbangcon.com/west

In 9th-century Europe, agriculture underwent a major refactoring — all to change a single magic constant. Traditionally, farmers left half their land uncultivated, to let it recover depleted nutrients; now they started leaving only a third fallow. This generates 33% more food on the same land! Sounds like an easy win, right?

Not so fast. The new three-field system took nearly two centuries to get fully deployed to production! Not everyone was happy with the pull request, and a lot of infrastructure needed reconfiguring to support the new model.

Sound familiar? It should! We sometimes convince ourselves programming is an exceptional discipline, with new and unique challenges. But many of our craft’s deepest problems are more general than we realize. Backward compatibility; systematic trade-offs; pipelines and bottlenecks; the importance of good tooling — all of these had their part to play in the long and difficult transition from two- to three-field agriculture.

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