Speaking at DevAroundTheSun

Next week, I’m honored to be part of DevAroundTheSun, a live 24-hour global event for COVID-19 relief that starts on May 12 at 12:00 UTC. It’s like LiveAid or Lady Gaga’s recent One World: #TogetherAtHome, but for developers. You can watch on Twitch and YouTube, and all the talks are relatively short at 25 minutes… think TED talk style and length, and hopefully similar quality in content even though the production is a little different since we have to present our talks from home. Some of the speakers may be familiar to you, such as Bjarne Stroustrup giving an updated version of his actual TED talk, and Kevlin Henney who is always entertaining and enlightening. Other speakers may be new to you and me, but are all excellent presenters with interesting topics.

The event starts at 12:00 UTC May 12, and I’m scheduled to be on in the second hour (13:20 UTC), which will be right around dawn for me here in Seattle. I’ll be giving a new talk with all-new material about how to get from OldThing to your shiny NewThing… and in this case “all-new material” means I have to finish writing it this weekend. Here’s the title slide and abstract:

Great new ideas are common, and their developers and users want them to succeed. So why do the large majority fail to ever achieve wide adoption? For example, thousands of genuinely interesting programming languages have been invented, but few ever achieved widespread or long-lasting use. This talk considers examples, and identifies some basic (but frequently-violated and hard-to-make-retroactive) strategic success predictors, that you can use to evaluate someone else’s new idea and to “design for success” in your own new project or language.

I hope you enjoy all parts of the event you’re able to watch, and I’ll post a link to the video recording when it’s available.