What Evolutionary Biology Can Tell Us About Software Development - Part 1

Etienne De Bruin welcomes Aaron Longwell, Scott Graves and Judah McAuley to this episode of the CTO Podcast. Aaron is the Software Development Manager at Serverless, Scott is the CTO at Reps and Co, as well as a Founding Partner at Scale Tech Consulting, and Judah is the Associate Director at Tinuit. In the first installment of this two-part episode, they’re exploring what engineers can learn from evolutionary biology when it comes to the software development process. 
You'll hear Etienne, Aaron, Scott and Judah talk about:
How software development follows patterns of biology and ecology, as well as dynamic systems theory.
The importance of The Adjacent Possible. This is where modification occurs in a network that makes something possible that wasn't possible before the modification. 
The way lay people think about code is much simpler than what coding actually is. "People who are not in software I always tell them, every piece of software you admire, …if you could peel the curtain back on that, you'll be shocked at how hard to understand and complicated and garbage the code looks," Aaron says. Software, especially coding, is much more complicated than it looks and there are so many algorithms that need to be followed. You can only change bits of code at a time or else the systems get out of balance. 
What matters most is how well the system around the code works. The thing that makes the code most adaptable is you. 
Why you should allow some randomness and some mess into your problem solving so that you can explore other avenues to resolve issues. 
Resources
Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn | Twitter
Serverless
Scott Graves | LinkedIn
Scale Tech Consulting 
Judah McAuley | LinkedIn 
Tinuiti

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