Adam Smith Builds an Application

Economics, psychology, game theory, and marketing; those fields of study imply a distinct lack of semicolons and curly braces. However, even the venerable Adam Smith, were he alive today, would recognize the applicability of those seemingly tangential components to the business we call software.

Many of us self-identify with the hard core branding of “geek” and “nerd,” or the softer choices, “programmer” and “developer.” However, we rarely hear mentioned “business person,” “saleswoman,” salesman,” “inventor,” “strategist,” or “economist,” yet they are equally, if not more accurate in the description of the talents of a software craftsperson. Though unstated, we, as developers, are expected to be skilled in each of those areas. Rarely in business are so many combined talents expected from an individual contributor.

Together, we'll harness the secrets that classical and 20th century research have uncovered from observing strategic interactive decision making through a large lens. Surprisingly, smart businesses and crafty developers are just now able to fully leverage these historical findings with the advent of commodity big-data processing, machine learning, evolutionary game theory, and a dash of intuition. All of these tactics can be neatly tied together via the occasionally-maligned threads of pop psychology and behavioral economics. Discover how to seat these newfound applications of knowledge in their well-deserved place at the table of computer science for better playing of the game that we call “programming.”

About Matthew McCullough

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

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