Bertrand Delacretaz
Bertrand Delacrétaz has spent more than 40 years building software that matters, notably for the Swiss Federal Parliament, the Swiss Television (RTS), and for Adobe, where he served as Principal Scientist before retiring in early 2026. A 14-year Apache Software Foundation Board member and open-source champion, he's been a regular conference speaker for over two decades. His motto: technology should serve people, not the other way around.
Session
Simplicity often takes a back seat in software engineering. Yet, it's absolutely key for creating durable and efficient systems.
Crafting simple software is hard and takes lots of efforts. It's about setting a high bar and persisting until the simplest solution emerges, which you can often tell by its beauty and efficiency.
This talk is based on more about 40 of software engineering experience, where the goal of essential simplicity has been reached in a few key projects. Digital audio recording, weather data management, interactive video kiosks, web app frameworks, the domains in which this happened are varied but a set of patterns emerges, that allowed us to reach high goals in terms of simplicity and efficiency in these projects.
There's no magic formula for simplicity, but our real-world examples will help you discover principles and a philosophy of simplicity that will help on your own journey.