CppCon 2021 Online Keynote: Six Impossible Things by Kevlin Henney

We’ve previously announced keynotes by Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, Lisa Lippincott, Michael Caisse, and Sean Parent. This is the last of our six conference keynotes to be announced.

Kevlin Henney

Kevlin will be online for an important discussion on the limits of what is possible in software.

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice, and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and websites, including Better Software, The Register, Java Report, and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also an editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.

Here is his talk description:

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Queen told Alice on her adventures through the looking glass. Only six? In software development we believe impossible things all the time, no matter the time of day!

In this talk, however, we are going to take a look at six specific impossible things that shape the limits of what we can develop, all the way from the smallest detail of integer representation to the minefield of task estimation and prioritisation, via the uncertainty of distributed systems and the limits of computability. Once we know our limits, we can work within them to create solutions rather than problems.