Finding Empathy Opportunities While You Code

Speaker: Andrea Goulet

In a software developer’s day-to-day work there are micro-moments that matter — opportunities to use empathy to drive decisions that lead to healthier codebases, healthier teams, healthier relationships, and personal health, too. These moments are hiding in plain sight in commit messages, code reviews, naming conventions, error handling, and more. In this workshop, participants will look at their coding practices with a fresh perspective to uncover how to notice opportunities and apply empathy effectively for a positive change by using Empathy-Driven Development.

By examining how empathy drives development, participants will learn specific ways to:

• Identify opportunities to apply empathy throughout daily development practices

• Use technical empathy skills to enhance code maintainability

• Explore empathy concepts using software development metaphors

• Deliver effective communication artifacts that nurture healthy social and software systems