Boyen is a husband, father of two, Irish Trad musician, and self-proclaimed Software Physicist exploring the forces shaping software development. Currently, he works as a Staff Engineer at Alliander, specializing in risk analysis for Software & Architecture across the enterprise.
It depends…
Ever struggled to articulate why one design choice feels better than another?
Most design debates in teams aren’t really about rules; they’re about misaligned forces. Coupling, Cohesion, and Change underpin many commonly cited best practices, and discussions about conflicting practices are often reflections of which kind of pain we’re trying to avoid.
As AI takes on more of the coding work, it becomes increasingly important to understand how complexity grows, trade-offs ripple, and systems succeed or fail. In this talk, we’ll introduce a practical framework for reasoning about these forces. You’ll learn how small structural choices amplify or contain change, why opposing rules can both be correct, and how to make deliberate trade-offs with clarity. With this shared language, “it depends” stops being a dead end and becomes the starting point for informed design decisions.
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