Unmaintainable balls of mud everywhere, combined with the need for always going faster, bigger, more robust and more complex. To solve these challenges, we have internalized to look for the next silver bullet at the horizon (or at Stack Overflow). As IT is moving fast, it must be that way. Yesterday’s knowledge cannot solve today’s challenges – or can it? Well, while not all knowledge is worth preserving, some is timeless and addresses fundamental problems of IT. Yet, we tend to lose this wisdom with every new generation of developers and every new trend that presses on the market. In this talk we will try to excavate some of this timeless wisdom by re-visiting a series of classic computer science papers. We will extract the key ideas of those papers and apply them to the challenges of today’s IT. Be prepared for some surprising rediscoveries! Disclaimer: We will not take responsibility for a sudden urge to start reading computer science papers after this session…