Tomas Petricek
Biography
I'm an assistant professor at Charles University in Prague and a partner at fsharpWorks. I believe that the most fundamental work is not the one solving hard problems, but the one that offers new ways of thinking.
I follow this belief in my academic research on programming systems and history & philosophy of computing, but also in my writing on functional programming and in my F# trainings and consulting.
Previously, I did a PhD on context-aware computations at University of Cambridge, worked on F# tools in Microsoft Research, built novel tools for data exploration at The Alan Turing Institute, as well as studied programming systems and taught software engineering at the University of Kent.
NewCrafts Paris 2023
Pop-up from Hell: On the growing opacity of software systems
Talk
The pop-up ad was the most hated idea of the 90s web and we are all glad it is a thing of the past. But can we learn something about the evolution of software systems in general by looking at the history of the web platform that made the pop-up ad possible and later killed it?
In this talk, I will look at the evolving relationship between a platform and applications that are built on top of it. Using the history of the web, but also modern text editors, as examples, I will identify a couple of trends. Applications have a tendency to reimplement platform features, make more of their state inaccessible and become more opaque as the result. The changes are often motivated by valid engineering concerns like efficiency, but they also limit what the user can do and may be the source of accessibility issues.
If we want to build accessible applications that empower the user, we need to be aware of such trends when evolving software systems. In other words, that annoying pop-up ad may not have been the worst thing that ever happened to the web!
