Lilly Ryan
Lilly Ryan is a recovering historian and current information security specialist based in Melbourne. Over the last decade she has worked as a Python developer, Linux wrangler, and penetration tester specialising in web application and cloud security.
Lilly is a fierce advocate for consumer privacy rights, a human-centred web, and making tech knowledge accessible to all.
she/her
Session
"In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams
Computers, despite a frankly alarming amount of hype, are not good at nuance. They are usually fast, occasionally obedient, and capable of storing quite a lot of cat pictures, but when asked to represent something as slippery as "a person" or "Tuesday", things begin to get weird.
Human beings remain the most reliable mediums for intepreting reality in a format that can machines can parse. Regrettably, reality is complex. We make heavy use of abstractions to handle this complexity, but if you ask any seasoned developer about designing systems to handle names, time, geography, or a thousand other "standards", you will be met with either a thousand-yard stare or a wild, keening noise. If no group chat can agree on whether cereal is a soup, how can we tell a computer what to do?
Apart from the difficulty of agreeing on categories, reality's refusal to be abstracted neatly can lead to system inaccuracies, poor user experiences, security vulnerabilities, and the amplification of social harms. But given our industry, our systems of government, and (quite often) our sense of self are built on top of the very same kind of abstractions, how can we do better in the systems we are responsible for?
In this talk, we will look at some of the most common ways that our systems and data models frequently do not match reality, explore approaches to handling reality gracefully, and consider how to anticipate flaws in those models and minimise harmful outcomes. This will be an introduction to the topic for some, a refresher for others, and possibly a useful thing to show that one boss with unrealistic expectations.
Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how and when to make effective use of abstractions in systems, and probably an existential headache.