David Hockney, one of the world's most famous living artists, is also a proponent of digital art. Hockney would argue significant technological advances occurred in the 15th Century with the arrival of optical devices. Centring around the mid 15th Century a radical transformation in the visual quality of painting happened. What we would call photorealistic today replaced the stylised rendering of the likes of Giotto. An understanding of optics and lenses gave artists a new way to capture the reality that the eye could see.

Ali Kheyrollahi is a solution architect building web scale solutions, trying to marry scalability with performance. He loves HTTP, API design and business-modelling DDD-style. An Open Source author and blogger, he tries to give back to the community what he has gratefully taken from it. He is a blogger and has co-authored a book. "BUILD STUFF" is a Software Development Conference for people who actually build stuff.