A Discourse in Humane Development

A Discourse in Humane Development

Code is not a dialogue between the developer and the machine. It is a conversation between clients, teams, developers, users, and everyone in between.

There’s a tendency to look only at the client- or consumer-focused result (end-user satisfaction) when considering humane development. But if there’s an end user, there’s a beginning user, too. And that beginning user — the developer — is also human.

Humane development is acknowledging and accommodating any humans who will interact with our applications, including those who interact with the code base itself. This means recognizing that our fellow developers matter just as much as our future users.

In introducing the concept of humane development, this talk will examine limitations of human brains, with a deeper dive into conditions that might impair working memory.

So, how do we architect our code to match human cognitive limitations? We will look at some complex code to explore:
-How the code pushes working memory limits
-Ways of recognizing that your code has become too complex
-Methods of transforming code into functional chunks that our brains can more comfortably process

Speakers