Things You Thought You Didn’t Need To Care About • Holly Cummins • GOTO 2025

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph
https://gotocph.com

Holly Cummins - JavaOne Rock Star. Building Quarkus to make the cloud cloudier, PC member @Holly_Cummins 

ORIGINAL TALK TITLE
Things You Thought You Didn’t Need To Care About That Have a Big Impact On Your Job

RESOURCES
https://hollycummins.com
https://hollycummins.com/type/blog
https://bsky.app/profile/hollycummins.com
https://hachyderm.io/@holly_cummins
https://twitter.com/holly_cummins
https://github.com/holly-cummins
https://linkedin.com/in/holly-k-cummins

ABSTRACT
Development is about working with computers, right?
Well, not quite. Development is all about working with computers (easy), and working with people (hard). Oh, and it’s about physics.

Things like the speed of light and thermodynamics influence APIs, because they influence hardware and networking. If, like Holly, you slept through statistics modules in university, it will be a surprise to discover how statistics has changed our development workflows. Finally, we mustn’t forget economics. The end of zero-interest-rates has changed the employment landscape for many of us.

In this wide-ranging talk, Holly will cover why the end of Moore’s law means we might finally need to get to grips with concurrent programming, why is Loom a good idea now when green threads were a bad idea, why is AOT a good idea now when it used to be a bad idea, and how much you should care about business studies, finance, and statistics. [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
01:05 Geography 101: Norway
02:59 How to make decisions in a complex world
04:05 Statistics 101: Bayes' theorem
19:16 Statistics in different industries
21:27 Top tip
22:35 Why does concurrency make my head hurt?
23:48 Electrical engineering 101: Chip design
31:02 Virtual threads
32:09 Why did green threads flop & loom succeed?
33:37 Meteorology 101: Cloud
34:56 Physics 101: Quantum computing
38:53 Business studies 101: Venture capital
42:00 Macroeconomics 101: Interest rates
46:31 Economics 101: Jevon's paradox
50:59 Summary
52:06 Outro

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3623

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Anne Currie, Sarah Hsu, & Sara Bergman • Building Green Software • https://amzn.to/3UjSClv
Marc Nuri San Felix • Full Stack Quarkus & React • https://amzn.to/4cXyRrh
John Clingan & Ken Finnigan • Kubernetes Native Microservices with Quarkus & MicroProfile • https://amzn.to/4cWQ3wV
Ioannis Kolaxis • 101 Green Software • https://www.kolaxis.dev/book-green-software
Mehdi Khosrow-Pour • Green Computing Strategies for Competitive Advantage and Business Sustainability • https://amzn.to/2YXbI7j
Lässig, Kersting & Morik • Computational Sustainability • https://amzn.to/3APBW8r
Carola Lilienthal • Sustainable Software Architecture • https://amzn.to/3yFXxoS

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