Interaction

At the Leetspeak 2014 conference in Gothenburg, independent consultant and entrepreneur Greg Young gave the talk “The Art of Destroying Software.” The talk was quite unique in many senses. Young started with two questions in a row. “How many of you have been in a talk about writing code? How many of you have been in a talk about refactoring code?” Until the end of the talk he followed the same dynamic: asking questions. At times he got vocal answers from the audience, or he got hands raised and was able to count them. At times he made them think by raising rhetorical questions such as: “What if you were optimized from the very beginning to be able to delete code?” The ultimate result was a strong interaction with the audience, and he kept their attention high over the 40 minutes. Young’s ultimate point was that as a software developer you should optimize your code for deleting, so that any program should be possible to rewrite in one week. The talk, oriented to people who code, was delivered effectively. He even used only two slides, and most of the time he was sitting down at the edge of the stage to be closer to the audience. It was a really interesting talk for its communication, point of view, and for making the audience think, reflect, and interact.