Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
According to the traditional economic theory, markets are fully efficient and humans operate in them in a rational way. In the late 70s Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started disproving this efficient markets hypothesis, contrasting the consistently logical Homo Economicus (Econ) they depicted, with the more realistic Human who takes decisions based on his questionable points of view. Doing so they gave birth to the study of the psychological factors involved in the making of these decisions, called Behavioral Economics.
The same flawed reasoning also impacts other fields like software engineering: we cannot behave as cold Econ when spending or investing our money, or as rational Engeen when coding. We are humans and this inevitably influences our choices.
The anchoring effect and the availability bias affect how we benchmark and evaluate the performances of our programs. The pro-innovation and bandwagon biases drive our technical decisions, making us to blindly follow hypes and gurus. The not-invented-here syndrome pushes us to create homemade tools instead of using de-facto standards. The framing effect makes us solving the same problem in different ways, depending on how it is presented.
During this talk we will go through these and other heuristics and shortcuts used by our brain, as found by behavioral economists in almost 50 years of research, and examine them in the context of software engineering, discussing their consequences on the quality of our work.
According to the traditional economic theory, markets are fully efficient and humans operate in them in a rational way. In the late 70s Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started disproving this efficient markets hypothesis, contrasting the consistently logical Homo Economicus (Econ) they depicted, with the more realistic Human who takes decisions based on his questionable points of view. Doing so they gave birth to the study of the psychological factors involved in the making of these decisions, called Behavioral Economics.
The same flawed reasoning also impacts other fields like software engineering: we cannot behave as cold Econ when spending or investing our money, or as rational Engeen when coding. We are humans and this inevitably influences our choices.
The anchoring effect and the availability bias affect how we benchmark and evaluate the performances of our programs. The pro-innovation and bandwagon biases drive our technical decisions, making us to blindly follow hypes and gurus. The not-invented-here syndrome pushes us to create homemade tools instead of using de-facto standards. The framing effect makes us solving the same problem in different ways, depending on how it is presented.
During this talk we will go through these and other heuristics and shortcuts used by our brain, as found by behavioral economists in almost 50 years of research, and examine them in the context of software engineering, discussing their consequences on the quality of our work.
![[VDBUH2026] Julien Topçu - Hexagonal Architecture in Practice](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QZrl5tghsTA/mqdefault.jpg "[VDBUH2026] Julien Topçu - Hexagonal Architecture in Practice
There always comes a point where software becomes so complex and old that it becomes unmaintainable. Updating the technical stack without breaking everything becomes impossible, implementing new features takes longer, and the technical debt is so overwhelming that refactoring becomes exorbitant.
What if we told you that all of this is more of a practice problem than a software aging problem?
Come and discover through hands-on experience in this 100% live coding session how Hexagonal Architecture can tackle software complexity, making it possible for you to be adaptable and sustainable while helping you manage your technical debt more effectively.")
