Some thirty years after Turing Award winner Fred Brooks’ seminal work ‘No Silver Bullet’ was published, the industry has paved over his enthusiastic skepticism, with an air of pessimism and apathy.
After tearing down the failed software development methodologies of our predecessors, I will leverage Brooks’ work to frame a critique of current industry themes such as DevOps, Microservices, and Cloud Computing. Lest however, you be consumed by an unshakable hopelessness that, as an industry, we are bound to Santayana’s Sisyphean prophesy (‘those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it’), I will show that Brooks’ theories are alive, well and in fact thriving in niche communities paving our way forward.

In a previous life, Bill (@williamberryiii) crafted scenery for Broadway, a la Pirates of Penzance, but now crafts software for the enterprise, a la Pirates of Silicon Valley. In his roles as Technical Lead and Application Architect for The Retail Equation, Bill has lead service integrations with Fortune 500 retailers, curated DevOps initiatives and always enjoys building high performance, multi-tenant distributed data APIs. As a deeply curious engineer, he enjoys pairing complex problems with simple and elegant solutions. Striving for meaningful change, Bill believes that cultural and technical progress is best made through evolution and not revolution.