Presentation: Tweet"Mythbusting modern hardware to gain “Mechanical Sympathy”"

Jackie Stewart, the Formula 1 racing legend, believed that to be a great driver one must have a mechanical sympathy for how a car works to get the best out of it. He described this as the driver working in harmony with their car. To this day he is considered by many to be the smoothest, and possibly the greatest, driver ever. He stopped after 3 world titles to focus on car safety having seen so many of his friends die behind the wheel of a race car.

I this session we will attempt to bust the “myth” that computer hardware has become so complicated that no average developer could possibly understand the platform on which their software is executing. Martin believes it is possible for the modern developer to sufficiently understand our platforms to the same extent that a racing driver can understand the mechanics of their racing cars.

Make no mistake, modern hardware is like a modern racing car. This hardware is phenomenally fast and only held up by the unsympathetic software modern developers subject it to in their quest to turn code into heat and stack traces!

This session will cover CPUs, memory, networking and storage IO. The attendees will get the opportunity to understand how these work and what considerations they can apply to have their software performing like a race car rather than a bumper car. You get the chance to see if this myth can be busted.