The Zen of Programming

GOTO Amsterdam 2022

A personal journey towards writing beautiful code

Ever since he wrote his first lines of code in 1982, Sander Hoogendoorn has been fascinated by the beauty of some code and the pure evil of other code. In these 40 years, Sander has worked together with hundreds of developers, and he has written code in many different paradigms, languages, ecosystems, and frameworks, always in search of better and more elegant ways of solving problems.

Is there really no silver bullet? Should you follow principles or intuition? Does architecture help or block you? Can frameworks kill your projects? How solid is SOLID? Why DRY? When is your code conceived? What is beautiful and what is ugly code? Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Functions before objects? What are monads and should you apply them? Is small beautiful? Does unit testing make debugging obsolete? And why should you take your mother out more often?

During this inspiring new talk Sander Hoogendoorn, life-long developer and currently CTO at e-commerce company iBOOD, investigates his personal journey through platforms, languages, principles, doubts, and struggles that so many developers also encounter during their careers, illustrating ideas and patterns that influenced and inspired him to how he currently codes. Fully functional, monadic, single-lined, clean, short-named variables, and automatically tested code – of course with real-life code examples.

Get inspired to discover your Zen and find your own path towards writing beautiful code.