A number of recent developments in software engineering --- from agile methods to aspect-oriented programming to design patterns to good enough software --- share a number of common attributes. These developments avoid a unifying theme or plan, focus on negotiation between different concerns, and exhibit a high level of context sensitivity. We argue that these developments are evidence of a postmodern turn in software engineering. In this paper, we survey a number of these developments and describe their potential implications for the practice of conceptual modelling.