From Amdahl to Zipf: Fundamental Laws of the Physics of People

It’s all too easy to think software is magic - but it’s not. Most of the time, it’s not even sufficiently advanced. Like everything else in our world, the people you work with and the products they build are subject to the fundamental laws of nature. Based on an original idea by Pieter Hintjens, this talk explores the laws of our universe - from the fundamental laws of physics to the eponymous laws found in the IT industry.

Dylan Beattie shows you how Newton’s Laws of Motion can explain why big organisations struggle with agile development, how the Equivalency Principle explains why so many startups fail, and why Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle makes it so hard to estimate and report on your software projects. Finally, we’ll look at three of the oldest laws of software engineering - Moore’s Law, Amdahl’s Law and Conway’s Law - and how they can prove that if you don’t stop having meetings, the internet will stop working.