Contact me here. Services: Workshops Talks Spec pairing and review Retainer services Workshops If you’re building complex, expensive systems, my workshops on software modeling can help you save hundreds of thousands in saved developer time and maintenance work. With my training you’ll learn how to Catch complex bugs that would take weeks or months to fix, and fix them before you start writing code. Build complicated systems quickly and with confidence.| Hillel Wayne
Official Description: Distributed systems are hard. Even a few interacting agents can lead to tens of thousands or even millions of unique system states. At that scale, it’s impossible to test for, or even reason about, every possible edge case. We need better tools not just for building systems, but for understanding them. To truly understand distributed systems, we need to turn to software modeling, or “formal methods”. A few hours of modeling catches complex bugs that would take week...| Hillel Wayne
I saw this question on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange: What are the barriers that prevent widespread adoption of formal methods? The question was closed as opinion-based, and most of the answers were things like “its too expensive!!!” or “website isn’t airplane!!!” These are sorta kinda true but don’t explain very much. I wrote this to provide a larger historical picture of formal methods, why they’re actually so unused, and what we’re doing to make them used.| Hillel Wayne
I really like the c2 wiki as a historical artifact: a lot of big names in Agile and Extreme Programming argued with each other there.1 One thing they did was the Extreme Programming Challenge, where people tried to test the limits of these approaches. They’d find edge problems (designing databases, remote teams, etc) and see if Agile/XP still worked in that context. In almost every case they quickly decided that yes, it works just fine.| Hillel Wayne
I really like decision tables but they’ve fallen out of common knowledge. Let’s fix that. A decision table is a means of concisely representing branching and conditional computations. In the most basic form, you have some columns that represent the “inputs” as booleans and some columns that represent outputs and effects. It looks like this: A B C f(A, B, C) T T T 1 T T F 3 T F T 7 T F F “cucumber” F - - NullError - means that it doesn’t matter what the value is.| Hillel Wayne