I am a 28 year from Birmingham, England who's been programming for as long as I can remember. I am a full stack developer and have been coding in Rails since 2005. I am currently trying to spend more time contributing to open source and sharing my experience. I am technical co-founder of Meducation - a social education network for medical students and doctors.
Developers are a unique breed of people. We're highly intelligent, creative, problem solvers who have a unique and powerful set of skills. We are often passionate, determined and confident and we love challenges. But we can also be obsessive, difficult to manage and perfectionists. We can get caught up in solving problems that distract us from what we should be doing. We can be isolated and insular.
This presentation will look at who we are as developers and how to get the most from our unique skills. We will look at the areas that we can be weak in, and how we can avoid pitfalls of those areas. We will also look at how we differ from designers, managers, marketers and other types of people we may work with, and how we can work best with them.
This will be an interactive presentation where we build a picture of the average developer in the room.
We will look at:
My talk will be interactive. As the talk progresses, the audience will be asked to answer questions on their laptops, in order to paint an accurate portrayal of the similarities and differences that developers share. I will then reflect on what those answers mean to our productivity and how we can make the most from them.
The talk is a bit of an experiment, but should be fun, interesting and thought-provoking, and hopefully make us more productive when we go back to our jobs.