GOTO Berlin is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 60 top speaker and 400 attendees. The conference cover topics such as Java, Open Source, Agile, Architecture, Design, Web, Cloud, New Languages and Processes.

Presentation: "KEYNOTE: The Epistemology of Software Engineering"

Time: Thursday 17:10 - 18:00 / Location: Estrelsaal A

How do you know your software is correct? When you dig deep into that question, it turns out there's no easy answer. There may be no answer whatsoever.

This question parallels one of the most fundamental questions in philosophy: "How do I know a proposition is true?" This question is so difficult that there's an entire field of philosophy dedicated to it, epistemology. The various schools of thought in epistemology are eerily similar to the various techniques used by software engineers to determine software correctness.

Take a whirlwhind tour through the epistemology of software engineering and see how philosophers like Descartes, Hume, and Locke can teach us to write better code. See how schools of thought like foundationalism, skepticism, and empiricism relate to software development. And finally, you'll see why Aristotle would have been a terrible programmer.

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Nathan Marz, Creator of the Storm and Cascalog open-source projects

Nathan Marz

Biography: Nathan Marz

Nathan Marz is the creator of many open source projects which are relied upon by over 50 companies around the world, including Cascalog and Storm. Nathan is also working on a book for Manning publications entitled "Big Data: principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems".

Nathan was previously, he was the lead engineer at BackType before being acquired by Twitter in 2011. At Twitter, he started the streaming compute team which provides and develops shared infrastructure to support many critical realtime applications throughout the company.

Currently, Nathan is working on a new startup.

Twitter: @nathanmarz