Orders of Magnitude
Davy Stevenson • Potsdam, Germany • Talk

Date: August 01, 2015
Published: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000
Announced: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Orders of Magnitude by Davy Stevenson

Up until the 17th century, the world was mostly limited to what we could see with the naked eye. Our understanding of things much smaller and much larger than us was limited. In the past 400 years our worldview has increased enormously, which has led to the advent of technology, space exploration, computers and the internet. However, our brains are ill equipped to handle dealing with numbers at these scales, and attempt to trick us at every turn. Software engineers deal with computers every day, and thus we are subject to both incredibly tiny and massively large numbers all the time. Learn about how your brain is fooling you when you are dealing with issues of latency, scalability, and algorithm optimization, so that you can become a better programmer.

eurucamp 2015