Panel on methodology and agility, this Monday (20 September)






Today (well, tomorrow as of writing, but when you see this it will probably be today for you) I am participating in a panel discussion with Ivar Jacobson, Robert Martin and Carlos Zapata on “The Future of Methods”, hosted by the SEMAT/Essence movement. It takes place at 18:30 CET (i.e. Paris/Zurich etc.), 12:30 EDT, 9:30 … Read more




On beauty and software (online talk on Wednesday, 17 CET / 11 EDT / 8 PDT)






This Wednesday (still “tomorrow” as I am writing this), 10 March 2021, I am giving a talk on “The Beauty of Software” on the occasion of the graduation ceremony of the first students of the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology. The event starts at 17 Schaffhausen/Zurich/Paris etc. time (11 AM New York, 8 AM San Francisco) … Read more




Tomorrow (Thursday) noon EDT: ACM talk on requirements






In the software engineering family requirements engineering is in my experience the poor cousin, lagging behind the progress of other parts (such as design). I have been devoting attention to the topic in recent months and am completing a book on the topic. Tomorrow (Thursday), I will be covering some of the material in a … Read more




Call for suggestions: beauty






On April 29 in the early evening at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology I will give a talk on “The Beauty of Software”, exploring examples of what makes some concepts, algorithms, data structures etc. produce a sense of esthetics. (Full abstract below.) I gave a first version at TOOLS last year but am revising and … Read more




Talk on requirements at UC Santa Barbara tomorrow






I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering. The abstract and rest of the information are here. I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).




This Wednesday in Nice: survey talk on the Eiffel method






The “Morgenstern Colloquium” at the University of Nice / INRIA Sophia Antipolis invited me to give a talk, next Wednesday (18 December) at 11 in Sophia Antipolis, in the aptly named* “Kahn Building”. The announcement appears here. I proposed various topics but (pleasant surprise) the organizers explicitly asked me to lecture about what I really … Read more




What happened to the kilogram? Schaffhausen, 16 December






December 16 (next Monday), the newly created Schaffhausen Institute of Technology organizes an entire day of events around three (no less) talks by the physics Nobel prize winner and MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle. The culmination of the day is a talk by Prof. Ketterle in the evening on “What happened to the kilogram?”. From the … Read more




June LASER school, Elba, on Devops, Microservices…






The 2020 LASER summer school has been announced. It will take place June 1 to 6* , as always in Elba Island, this year with the theme DevOps, Microservices and Software Development for the Age of the Web. The first five speakers are listed on the conference page, with more to come, from both academia … Read more




Sense and sensibility of systematically soliciting speaker slides






There is a fateful ritual to keynote invitations. The first message reads (I am paraphrasing): “Respected peerless luminary of this millennium and the next, Will your excellency ever forgive me for the audacity of asking if you would deign to leave for a short interlude the blessed abodes that habitually beget your immortal insights, and … Read more




Blockchains, bitcoin and distributed trust: LASER school lineup complete






The full lineup of speakers at the 2018 LASER summer school on Software for Blockchains, Bitcoin and Distributed Trust is now ready, with the announcement of a new speaker, Primavera De Filippi from CNRS and Harvard on social and legal aspects. The other speakers are Christian Cachin (IBM), Maurice Herlihy (Brown), Christoph Jentzsch (slock.it), me, … Read more