Arty Starr
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 3 - 5, 2017
Author of Idea Flow, Founder, FlowInsight
Arty Starr is a recognized Flow Experience expert, researcher, speaker and thought leader, and author of Idea Flow, how to measure the friction in software development. Arty's PhD research is developing a theory of momentum in software development, and she is creator of the FLOWS platform designed to help developers thrive and find joy through more time in the flow state. The company she founded, FlowInsight, is on a mission to bring back joy to our everyday work.
Arty is also a 2D/3D animator and artist, and has spent the last couple years building 3D apps in AR. She loves to share about her experiences with these technologies.
Presentations
Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure
This is my story of lessons learned on how to stop the crushing effects of business pressure… I was team lead with full control of our green-field project. After a year, we had continuous delivery, a beautiful clean code base, and worked directly with our customers to design the features. Then our company split in two, we were moved under different management, and I watched my project get crushed.
As a consultant, I saw the same pattern of relentless business pressure everywhere, driving one project after another into the ground. I made it my mission to help the development teams solve this problem. This is my story of lessons learned on how to transform an organization from the bottom up. I'll show you how to lead the way.
Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail
This is my story of lessons learned on why improvement efforts fail… I had a great team. We were disciplined about best practices and spent tons of time on improvements. Then I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn’t ship again for a year.
Despite our best efforts with CI, unit testing, design reviews, and code reviews, we lost our ability to understand the system. 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.
Keynote: Theory of Emotional Intelligence
With the advancement of AI, the paradigm shift of blockchain, the media war for the Internet, and escalating emotion, it's time to explore brand new territory – using software as a metaphor to construct a functional model of the human mind. Imagine your brain's logic is written in code. You fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint in the “Self” class, and inspect your brain's internal state. What are the state variables? What does the code look like? How do we fix the bugs?
I.flow() is a theory of consciousness that models motivation behavior of humans using software as a metaphor, because… why not? From the origin of gut feel reasoning, to the feedback loops that drive you, we'll breakdown the functional architecture that makes the universe tick.
Hacking Your Brain with Metaphors
Metaphors are the foundation of understanding – a conceptual lens that highlights some details, and hides others. Whether you're trying to understand an idea, design an architecture, or communicate an idea to a member of your team, metaphors shape the fabric of our thoughts.
The side-effect of understanding the world one way, is it becomes extremely difficult to see the world another way. Blindspots are the areas of understanding that fall outside of our metaphorical lenses, the invisible world that doesn't “make sense”.
Hacking Your Brain with Questions
Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Whether the context is software development, life, or solving the hardest problems in the world, the same principle applies: asking better questions leads to better answers. What if you had a tool that asked you just the right questions, in just the right moment?