Jan 2023 @ Adobe

Come to our January 2023 meetup! Adobe has generously offered to again host us at their Time Square office, while refreshments will be sponsored by Incredibuild!

Please fill out this form before RSVPing. Registrants who have not filled out the form will not be able to attend and will removed from the RSVP list. Despite what Meetup says, RSVP will open on January 3rd.

Featured Speaker: Dr. Titus Winters
Talk Title: "Configuration, Extensibility, Maintainability"

Description
Configurability should be considered a potential design smell, especially for systems and interfaces that will be in use for a long time. As an unfortunate result, “No, please don’t add that feature” must be a viable response to design proposals - just because a change can be made doesn’t mean it should. This is particularly challenging to square with a customer-focused product mindset: it’s hard to balance between long-term needs and immediate “the customer is always right.”

Providing options and toggles to configure settings gives users more freedom, but those settings become stale and brittle almost immediately, and regularly wind up pessimizing overall efficiency results. This is particularly true of rarely-used forms of extensibility and configuration. Of course, whatever sort of optionality and customization you provide will be hard to ever undo, because of Hyrum’s Law.

At the root of it, there is a fundamental tension between customization, extensibility, configuration vs. centralization, efficiency, and evolvability, and this tension needs to be considered when you are evaluating whether to add new customization and extensibility options. This talk will address some of the basic ways that design and invariants interact with long-term maintenance and optimization, and some heuristics for deciding whether adding a knob will turn out to be a mistake.

Speaker Bio
Titus is a principal Engineer at Google, where he has worked since 2010. He founded Abseil, Google’s open-source C++ library that underpins more than 250M lines of Google code with 12K+ active internal users. He is one of the four arbiters for Google’s official C++ style guidelines. For the last 11 years, Titus has been organizing, maintaining, and evolving the foundational components of Google’s C++ codebase using modern automation and tooling. Titus is the former chair for the Library Evolution Working Group (LEWG) in WG21. He is also the lead author for the book “Software Engineering at Google.” (O’Reilly, 2020).