Your brain on software development

Description

The brain encounters more complexity than it can possibly deal with in life, and it has evolved a rich set of heuristics to deal with the problem. Those heuristics are fantastically tuned for staying fed, not getting eaten by bears, etc., but are they well suited for designing software?

Fahran Wallace explores the intersection of programming, architecture, and psychology through the medium of funny-in-retrospect memories, borrowed war stories, and attempts to avoid people swearing at her design choices five years later. Fahran threads together stories of systems that ended up a very strange shape or were killed altogether not through bad coding but through humans collectively optimizing for the wrong thing. You’ll learn about the biases that affect our programming choices, how we favor the first solution we think of (the anchoring effect) and are suspicious of things that were "not invented here,” and just how difficult it is to change your worldview (the backfire effect).