Mike McGahan
Dr Mike designs, builds, and maintains the web platform at Meetup, making it faster and easier for engineers to develop high-quality applications. He also leads the company's Web Engineering Guild dedicated to establishing and communicating best practices in the discipline. With an eclectic background in cognitive science and engineering that reflects his deep interest in UX and software architecture, he is constantly in search of the best strategies to create applications that are not just a pleasure to use, but a pleasure to build.
What's the relationship between a stick figure drawing and a higher-order function? What do graphic novels have to tell us about designing complex software applications? Whether you're just starting to code or have been designing massive software systems for decades, determining ÔÇ£the right level of abstractionÔÇØ is a critical skill that can be difficult to define in practice, so this talk will synthesize lessons from the visual world of comics (along with a dose of cognitive science) to define principles that allow you to evaluate and control it. Somewhere between the detail of the underlying hardware and simple shape of a feature spec, your code can be tuned to encapsulate just the right amount of information to support composable, maintainable software.