I had the pleasure of seeing Josh Holmes keynote CodeStock Saturday morning. His presentation, “The Lost Art of Simplicity,” was very well done. Very broad topic, but very applicable to likely everyone in the room. Certainly I took away many good points. In some ways, it’s a lot of points that we *know* at an academic level, but not points that we’ve necessarily internalized and made part of the standard development process. He brought up an example of corporate users copying Access databases around via email, and he asked “what is the *truth* at that point” – meaning which is the ‘master’ data? This echoed my NADS post from some years ago – when you copy spreadsheets around, you end up with a Non-Authoritative Data Source problem. 
The talk was aimed at getting developers to simplify, rather than write complex systems. Occasionally I have the opposite problem, with clients wanting more complex systems than it seems they actually need. There’s 20 processes in place when 8 would do, but simplifying the organization’s workflow to scale down to 8 processes would take more effort than just replicating the 20 processes in a computerized system. I have to say this ends up being the most frustrating position to be in, and I tend to want to not get involved in those projects. Sometimes I’ve been able to avoid those projects, but not always.
“Enterprise is a code word for complexity”. He metioned Twitter getting 15k transactions per second before deciding to move to a second server. I wish he’d also mentioned that it’s done in Ruby, just to drive home the point that dynamic languages *can* scale. I think he was going in that direction, but then stopped.
Josh’s talk seemed to get some good reactions from the attendees, and certainly gave us all a lot to think about. Although this is primarily a MS-based conference, Josh’s avoidance of an MS-specific talk was a welcome gesture. I suspect he’s given this talk to a variety of developer audiences regardless of background – it certainly fits. If you’ve got a chance to go hear Josh speak, take it. He’s a hugely knowledgeable person who’s also one of the friendliest guys I’ve had the chance of meeting at a conference in the past few years (we first met at the first CodeMash in 2007).
Simplicity is one of the Quaker core virtues, and I’m finding their spiritual insights into simplicity to be really, really profound. It’s one of the major things that sold me on joining them.
I thought you were a mason? Can you be a mason and a quaker at the same time? (half serious question – don’t know enough about either to know if there’s any mutually exclusive tenets)