Elevator Pitch
Being a good developer isn’t just about slinging code; we’re part of a community. Interacting with others in a community means feelings are involved.
In this talk you’ll learn how emotions are affecting you by modeling them as an API and looking at the code.
Description
Imagine that your brain is wired to an API, and that one of the endpoints triggers you to be absolutely furious when it’s called. All the other emotions have endpoints as well. This is the metaphor that I use to describe how feelings work.
When we think about emotions this way, they become a bit less scary. The metaphor allows us to use technical language to describe experiences which are often misunderstood.
To explain why it’s important to improve our emotional responses I go over research which describes how improperly handling your emotions can have significant impacts things like abstract thinking, short-term memory and executive function.
Then I present a toolbox full of techniques that you can use develop emotional fluency, and I illustrate a number of those techniques by describing my own emotional challenges as if they were written in code. I describe how I used those skills to “refactor” that code.
This topic is particularly relevant today, as the non-coding aspects of developer life are becoming more important than the coding ones. Thriving in a diverse community requires us to develop our skills in communication, understanding and empathy. I want to share what I’ve learned about emotions in a way developers can relate to, so they can grasp how feelings impact not only their own quality of work, but their ability to work well with others.
Notes
If you read my bio, you’ll see that I am in a unique position to make ill-defined and imprecise feelings understandable to a technical audience. I’ve spent years developing the emotional API idea, and as I’ve done so I’ve found more and more research that points to specific measurable impacts on our lives as developers. This has helped me frame the benefits of this emotional work clearly.