Old Is the New New

Everything is changing. Everything is new. Frameworks, platforms and trends are displaced on a weekly basis. Skills are churning.
And yet ...
Beneath this seemingly turbulent flow there is a slow current, strong and steady, changing relatively little over the decades. In this talk we revisit the present through the past, looking at the enduring principles that shape code and architecture, the ideas that cycle round, each time becoming perhaps a little better defined, a little more mature, and look to see what else might be on the horizon.

Target Audience: architects, developers, technical managers and leaders
Prerequisites: knowledge in software design and development practices
Level: Practicing

Extended Abstract
Everything is changing. Everything is new. Frameworks, platforms and trends are displaced on a weekly basis. Skills are churning.
And yet ...
Beneath this seemingly turbulent flow there is a slow current, strong and steady, changing relatively little over the decades. Concepts with a long history appear in new forms and fads and technologies. Principles are revisited. Ideas once lost to the mainstream are found again. New blends of old concepts become possible.
In this talk we revisit the present through the past, looking at the enduring principles that shape code and architecture, the ideas that cycle round, each time becoming perhaps a little better defined, a little more mature, and look to see what else might be on the horizon.
We will journey through development process and the foreshadowing of agile development, the prehistory of TDD, the recurring theme of modularity in different paradigms and architectures, the road from SOA to microservices, the historical cycles of virtualisation and containers, of networks and cloud computing.