Masterclass 14th of December 2023

Julien Palard’s Masterclass

# Shape your tools

A talk about the multiples tensions between my tools (OSes, programming languages, libraries…) and me as a software engineer and how they evolved/resolved during my career. Those tensions exist in many dimensions, some well drawn and obvious, some blurry, like close-source vs open-source, low-level vs high-level, slow vs fast, eco-friendly or not, accessible or not… In the end many tensions can be simplified to « who does the work »: us or our machines? Both, obviously, but the effort is constantly shifting: programming today is nothing like programming 70 years ago, and hopefully nothing like programming in 10 years. Our tools, our choices, the way we’re resolving those tensions are shaping our minds, and that’s not OK, let’s take back control!