Elevator Pitch
Software is a relatively young profession, and it started as a hobby for most of us. By looking at a couple incidents in other professions, we can glean valuable lessons as to what it means to be a professional in the software field.
After all, lives are counting on it.
Description
In the 1850s, a major cholera outbreak in London changed the course of medicine. In 1986, the Challenger exploded live on TV. Both of these events have lessons that we, as software developers, need to learn and incorporate in our professional lives.
In this talk, we’ll look at two different events that happened in two different professions and see parallels with our own profession. For example, how do you handle the push to get “that one last feature” in before the release? How do you approach a situation in which a critical bug is about to be released and nobody cares? We’ll explore those topics and more as we look at professionalism in the software community.
Notes
This talk has been well received over the past year or so as it combines real world situations (a cholera epidemic in the 1800s and the Challenger disaster in 1986) with principles that can be applied to software development. In fact, one listener was quoted as saying “It was the first talk that I didn’t look at my phone the entire time.”
It doesn’t just look at other professions, as it provides applicable examples in software. For example, how & why a professional should prevent SQL injection.
My Pluralsight course “Professionalism for Developers” grew out of this talk.