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Kevlin Henney

Independent Consultant

Kevlin Henney is an independent consultant, speaker, writer, and trainer helping individuals, teams, and companies improve the state of their development practice. Kevlin’s development interests are in patterns, programming, and process, with a long track record in programming practices, agile skills, and software architecture. He has contributed to open source projects and been a columnist for various magazines and websites, including Better Software, The Register, Java Report, and CUJ. He is coauthor of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. Kevlin (kevlin.tel/) is editor of the book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and its website.

Speaker Presentations
Thursday, November 14, 2013 - 8:30am
Keynote
Worse Is Better—For Better or for Worse

More than two decades ago, Richard P. Gabriel proposed the idea that “Worse Is Better” to explain why some things that are designed to be pure and perfect are eclipsed by solutions that are compromised and imperfect. This is not simply an observation that things should be better but are not, or that flawed and ill-considered solutions sometimes win out over those created with intention. Rather, many solutions that are narrow and incomplete work out better than those seen as comprehensive and complete.