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, I'll introduce a conceptual model for human interaction, identity, culture, communication, 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!

I'm not a scientist or a psychologist. 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 I struggled through the challenges of getting a software concept from my head to another developer's head (interpersonal Idea Flow), I 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 algorithm for peace and harmony among humans, we can start debugging the communication problems on our team.

About Arty Starr

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.

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