A talk given at BuildStuff 2018 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Classically-trained (if you can call it that) software engineers are used to clear problem statements and clear success and acceptance criteria. Need a mobile front-end for your blog? Sure! Support instant messaging for a million concurrent users? No problem! Store and serve 50TB of JSON blobs? Presto!

Unfortunately, it turns out modern software often includes challenges that we have a hard time with: those without clear criteria for correctness, no easy way to measure performance and success is about more than green dashboards. Your blog platform better have a spam filter, your instant messaging service has to have search, and your blobs will inevitably be fed into some data scientist’s crazy contraption.

In this talk I’ll share my experiences of learning to deal with non-deterministic problems, what made the process easier for me and what I’ve learned along the way. With any luck, you’ll have an easier time of it!