DDD Europe 2026 - Program

When the ubiquitous language isn't English

DDD Europe - Talk (50min)

Speakers

William Bartlett

William Bartlett
Description

There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. The latter is further complicated when English is not the team's first language, and the business doesn't speak it either, yet almost all programming languages, libraries and conferences use English.

Many dev teams are between a rock and a hard place: either translate the ubiquitous language into English, or maintain code that mixes multiple languages.

A British-American, who has been coding in France for 15+ years, will provide some options for teams facing this dilemma, based on his experience and some key facts about linguistics.


About William Bartlett

Second-generation developer, William had his first email account in 1990 at the age of 6 and fell into IT at the age of 10. He loves learning programming languages and human languages. This British-American who has lived in France for most of his life, has been helping dev, ops and product teams get the most out of their skills, in multilingual environments, using a modern methods toolbox with Agile, DevOps, Craft, DDD, complexity sciences...