Before I even got involved with the conference, there were several names and topics surfacing as potential keynotes. The community organizers had started conversations and things were falling into place. I think the original plans called for one single opening keynote, but it seemed as though there was potential to add a second on the morning of Day 2.
Organically Derived Keynote
When we opened up speaker submissions, we got a lot of great topics. One of them, from James Ashley, caught our attention as they were coming in. The title was certainly not your usual code-camp or user group session: What Recent Breakthroughs in Nerd Psychology Can Teach Us about Software Development. The abstract asked some pointed questions like "why don't tools make software development faster?", "why can't we estimate?" and "How much money should developers make?" The questions alone caught my attention. The abstract went on to say that these problems are psycho-social problems and not computer science or engineering problems. Further: recent studies in "nerd psychology" have shed light on these problems and that ultimately people skills would be part of the solutions to the questions he posed.
This seemed like a prefect keynote to me for a couple reasons. First, it was completely platform-independent. One of the goals of the MADExpo organizers was to create a conference that would appeal to any kind of developer. The problems that James calls out are common to developers in Ruby, PHP, .NET or any platform. They apply to DBA's, web site developers, line-of-business developers, mobile and hardware dev's.
Second, it was a topic that would give attendees something-to-think-about. As I've followed twitter traffic for conferences that I haven't been able to attend, specifically CodeMash in 2008 and 2009, I noticed that most of the buzz was around sessions that had no code - or even no slides. I'd learned of people like Joe O'Brien at EdgeCase for what was an apparently amazing session called Refactoring the Programmer. (If I recall correctly, this break-out session was so popular they created a repeat time slot on the fly so more people could see it.) I knew of Gary Short, but read countless posts on the greatness of his Technical Debt session (which I've now managed to miss in multiple states over a couple years.) I also heard great things about Mary Poppendieck's keynote. These things aren't unique to CodeMash (though they do a very good job of it).
I've been struck by talks on refactoring, design patterns, failing, writing - even unit testing - that were independent of technology and could benefit any developer. I've seen sessions like this at CodeCamps in Raleigh and Richmond, at bigger conferences like CodeStock, and even larger conferences like Advisor DevCons back in the day.
My point is this - while developers need to learn to use their tools better, they also need to learn how to make themselves better. This keynote promises to shed some light on ways we can make ourselves better.
The Unknown
I don't mean to imply that it was my idea to ask James to give his session as a keynote instead of just a breakout. Many of the organizers were intrigued by this abstract and I'm pretty sure that Steve Presley was the first to tweet about it.
We threw around the idea of using this session as a keynote, but unfortunately, none of us knew who James Ashley was. (Sorry James!) We also didn't know if he was capable of delivering a keynote - or even if he was a good speaker!
We Googled and Binged him and learned a little more about him. As luck would have it, he was presenting a Kinect Hacks 101 session at the Atlanta .NET user group and Andrew Duthie was going to be in Atlanta the next day. Andrew was able to talk to one of his colleagues that knew James. They were introduced and now we have a day-2 keynote.
James Ashley works for RazorFish and is part of a really cool team. Check out http://emergingexperiences.com/ to get an idea of some of the stuff they're doing with Natural User Interfaces.
The full abstract for our Friday morning keynote is below. You can learn more about James Ashley and his other MADExpo session here: http://madexpo.us/Speakers/jamesashley.
And don't forget to register!
What Recent Breakthroughs in Nerd Psychology Can Teach Us about Software Development.
The young science of software development is plagued by seemingly irresolvable mysteries such as:
- Why hasn't the proliferation of software frameworks and tools made software development go any faster?
- Why does the obsolete technology we abandoned five years ago always eventually reappear as something new and trendy?
- Why do developers find it impossible to predict how long a task will take until it is completed?
- How much should a developer be paid for a mythical-man-month of work?
- What is this fear of “coupling” that all software architects seem to exhibit?
Contemporary research reveals that these deep problems cannot be resolved within the traditional limitations of Computer Science because they are ultimately not engineering problems. Instead they are psycho-social problems precariously situated at the nexus of Boolean psychoanalysis and Gestalt parapsychology – and they need to be treated as such.
Recent breakthroughs in nerd psychology and aberrant psychology have shed light on these issues. We will explore the latest neuroscience of perceptual gorillas and mirror neurons in order to help explain the salient features of nerd psychology and how it makes software developers good at parts of their jobs but at the same time bad at other things.
Remember, you have people skills. This lecture will teach you how to draw on those skills to start thinking back inside-the-box in order to become a more effective you.
*You might have seen a schedule or a blurb advertising three keynotes, but as we started to synchronize schedules and travel plans, one fell through. Truth be told, we're glad to have a little extra breathing room in the schedule.
No comments:
Post a Comment