Presentation: A Programmer's Guide to Humans

Speaker: Janelle Klein, CTO, New Iron, Founder, Open Mastery
Agenda:
6-6:30 Dinner & Networking
6:30-7:30 Presentation

Sponsored by: New Iron (http://newiron.com) & Headspring (http://headspring.com)

A Programmer's Guide to Humans

What makes software development complex isn't the code, it's the humans. The most effective way to improve our capabilities in software development is to better understand ourselves.

In this talk, Janelle will introduce a conceptual model for human interaction, identity, relationships, and learning based on the foundational model of Idea Flow. If you were to write a simulator to describe the functions of the human brain, this talk would describe the architecture. That's right – we're going to breakdown the components of human consciousness into machine models! Learn how to understand the humans on your team and fix bugs in communication, by thinking about your teammates like code!

These ideas are based on a combination of personal experience, reading lots of cognitive science books, and a couple years of running experiments on developers. As Janelle struggled through the challenges of getting a software concept from her head into another developer's head (interpersonal Idea Flow), she learned a whole lot about humans.

As software developers, we have to work together, think together, and solve problems together to do our jobs. Code? We get it. Humans? WTF?!

Fortunately, humans are predictably irrational, predictably emotional, and predictably judgmental creatures. Of course those pesky humans will always do a few unexpected things, but once we know the algorithms that power our brains, we can hack our ability to learn faster, hack our ability to work together, and develop the capability to solve any problem we choose to solve.

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