Arty Starr
Rocky Mountain Software Symposium
Denver · November 20 - 22, 2015
Developer Experience Researcher, University of Victoria
Arty Starr has been a software engineer for 20+ years and is a researcher and pioneer of new theories of the developer's cognitive experience that help us recognize how developers' experiences are changing with AI. Her theories of developer momentum and troubleshooting help us see software development through an ecological lens, recognizing it as a living activity in motion and the living capacities of care and cognition that support this motion. Her aim is to bring heart, human-centric values, and agency to the craft of software development so we can build toward the type of world we want to live in. With richer perception and by recognizing what matters, we can light a path to a future of thriving habitats where humans and AI can collaborate well and thrive together.
Arty is the author of Idea Flow, a speaker, thought leader, and artist who loves mixing ideas across disciplines into a fusion of creativity to help make the world a better place through her projects.
Presentations
Open Mastery: Let's Conquer the Challenges of the Industry!
What if you could get upper management to care about your technical problems? Would you be willing to measure and prioritize the problems?
What if WE could stop the relentless business pressure that drives our software projects into the ground across the industry? I know this probably sounds impossible, but before you dismiss the idea entirely, let me show you that it is possible.
We can start a cascade of changes across the industry with only a handful of people that are willing to work together to make it happen.
The Art of Better
What does “better” really mean? If we eliminate duplication, is the code better? If we decide to skip the unit tests, are we doing worse? How do we decide if one design is better than another design?
In this talk, I'll introduce the Idea Flow Learning Framework, a data-driven feedback loop for improving your software development skills. By measuring the “friction” that occurs when developers interact with the code, we can identify the biggest causes of friction and systematically optimize developer experience.
With an unambiguous definition of “better” and objective feedback to learn what works, we can learn our way to better despite the vast world of gray.
How to Break the Software Rewrite Cycle
Despite our best efforts with Agile best practices – CI, unit testing, design reviews, code reviews – every few years we end up rewriting our software.
This talk is about my personal experiences with project failure, improvement failure, patterns across the industry, and the key lessons that were critical to success. I had a great team. We were disciplined with best practices and spent tons of time working on improvements. Yet still, I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn't ship again for another year.
We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn't solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.