38 - The Case for Formal Methods - Hillel Wayne

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At one end of the spectrum is the young Zuck encouraging his hackers to “move fast and break things.” And then there’s Hillel Wayne with a very different sort of advice: move a bit slower and get things right. Unsurprisingly, the more mature Mark Zuckerberg of today would now agree with Hillel. “When you build something that you don’t have to fix 10 times, you can move forward on top of what you’ve built,” Zuckerberg told BI.Hillel’s road to this wisdom was much shorter than Zuck’s. A couple years ago Hillel was working at a web development company that ran into a hairy distributed systems problem. The sheer complexity of it was overwhelming, so he starting looking for a way to make it manageable. That’s when he stumbled on TLA+. Long story short: Hillel fell in love.Now Hillel is a renowned formal methods consultant, advising and training companies on TLA+, Alloy, and various other formal methods. It’s part of his personal mission to evanalize the benefits of formal method…