Beauty and Beast – Emotional Programming

How do we make our software project welcoming, empathic, charming, beautiful? Mainusch and Sperber give examples for beauty and beast in code and communication throughout the software lifecycle. You will leave this talk inspired to talk about code even if you are not a nerd.

Target Audience: Anybody interested in the long-term dynamics of software development
Prerequisites: Passing familiarity with software development
Level: Practicing

Extended Abstract
We model the real world, we program behaviour, we build intelligent machines, we are creators of universes. Coders are mostly antisocial nerds. However, if you're a non-nerd involved in a software project, you will need to deal with the code produced by the nerds, even if it's as incomprehensible as their pick-up lines. Those incomprehensible programs, and the resulting mismatch between our minds, the world, and the code - are a key vulnerability of our universe. (And, if we continue to flood the real universe with IoT devices, that universe, too.) To address this vulnerability, people need to communicate - coders and non-coders, both about the code and through the code. We need code that is welcoming, empathic, charming, and beautiful. Software craftsmanship, functional programming, and domain-driven design all can help, but by themselves they are not enough.
Mainusch and Sperber are cretins of communication: They can't even decide which of them is the nerd. Sperber talks monads, Mainusch unsuccessfully waits for them to click. Mainusch talks ideas, Sperber puts code on slides. But in this talk, they will connect - and if they can connect, so can the people in your project. We walk a software lifecycle from back to front, giving examples for communication beauties and beasts alike, show how to overcome the inevitable communication breakdowns and find inspiration and beauty in your project.