Andy Hunt – keynote preview

Transcript

I hope they’ll come away with some inspiration and some hope. And remember that you personally can learn something new every day. It’s trite, but you can make a better version of yourself a little bit at a time every day. And I think you should. I think we need you.

We need everybody. We need all the brain power we can get to try to fix the issues of our industry and get better software out there.

Q: I guess you want to motivate people.

Yeah, because it’s easy to lose that. A lot of us got into software development for the joy of solving technical problems. You’re faced with something, and it’s really tricky.

How am I going to do this? How can I integrate these things together and use that library and come up with this new algorithm and whatever it might be? And in a lot of cases, we still get to do that, but in a lot of organizations, they’ve become kind of ticket factories, joyless ticket factories. And that’s not fun.

And that’s a hard environment to work in and to get into flow like Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it, you need a problem that is engaging enough. It can’t be so hard that it’s hopeless, but it can’t be so easy that it’s boring. Like, we’ll add this field to the database, same as ever. So you need something that’s challenging enough, but that you’re able to do it and really be able to put your whole energy into it and learn something from it. That’s the best environment possible.

And that’s the kind of stuff that we try to promote and try to see organizations enable. So that as a developer, you get to learn new things. You get to improve your skills and get better at it and get the team better at it and ultimately get the organization better at doing what they do and growing their capabilities.