We're extremely proud to announce that software design legend Mel Conway will join us at Domain-Driven Design Europe in Amsterdam next January.
More than ever, the software industry is learning to understand the impact of his 1968 paper about the design process, in which he stated that “organizations which design systems […] are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”. Just last year, ThoughtWorks Technology Radar included the “Reverse Conway Maneuver”, which involves structuring your organisation to achieve the desired system design.
Mel Conway’s career in IT began in 1956 with punched cards and vacuum-tube computers. From that time to now, his primary interest has been simplifying the process of building software. In 1963 two papers introduced four innovations that radically simplified the construction of COBOL compilers and that were adopted by several computer manufacturers.
In the 1970’s he consulted to hospitals and medical schools on computer-based systems for medical records. As an independent contractor he built interactive digital-to-video viewers for CAT and PETT scanners for three medical institutions. As a result of these innovations he was invited to describe his work at two radiology conferences.
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He has derived a set of design principles for building tools that simulate a hands-on experience for application construction, and in 2001 he was issued a patent for a system design based on this research.
Currently he is applying these ideas to building distributed applications.
Mel Conway joins Eric Evans, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Udi Dahan, David West, and a growing list of speakers in what is becoming one of the major Software Design events in Europe. Tickets are available at http://dddeurope.com.