Like science, software is in reproducibility crisis. All too often, “steps to reproduce” in bug reports don’t work or are too long and complicated. They shouldn’t be necessary to begin with. Fleets of servers suffer from constant “configuration drift”, making any incremental change to their state hazardous. Will an upgrade that worked yesterday work today? Will it work for you if it worked for me? We’re never quite sure. Lack of reproducibility hinders sharing, from lab reports to bug reports to build instructions to software packages to cloud infrastructure. The solution: miniaturizing the inputs to your lab experiment and to your build bots, the state of your laptop and of your resources in the cloud, using precise, shareable, composable declarative specifications.

The talk is moderated by Artem Pelenitsyn.

Mathieu is the CEO of Tweag I/O, an independent industrial lab helping startups and research groups within the enterprise boldly ship high-risk, high-reward digital products. He was involved in European initiatives for exascale storage, worked on build systems, programming language interop and compilers. In a previous life, Mathieu was a researcher in formal methods and programming language design. He has a PhD from École Polytechnique.