Did you know that crows are better than toddlers at generating novel solutions? It's true! In the earliest days of childhood, around the globe scientists have documented that human cognition struggles to generate novel solutions. But we are adept at imitation, transmitting and teaching the solutions that we see others put into practice. What does this have to do with software, and innovation, and the cultures we want to create for the communities we love? I'm a psychologist fascinated by cycles of innovation in developer communities, and I think a simple reframe lights the way forward for our industry: in this talk, rather than focusing on what drives individual developer productivity, together we’re going to focus on the science of what drives developers’ collaborative problem-solving. We'll dive into the cognitive architecture of problem-solving, as well as what I've learned from leading empirical research with thousands of developers.

Cat Hicks is a psychologist for software teams and defender of the mismeasured. She is the author of the Developer Thriving framework, the AI Skill Threat framework, and the VP of Research at Pluralsight. Cat is the founder of the Developer Success Lab, an open science research lab that creates empirical evidence about how organisations and individuals can achieve sustainable, resilient innovation in technology and create more well-being for technologists. Cat is also the founder of Catharsis Consulting, a scientific consultancy that connects organisations to human-centred evidence strategies. Cat holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, serves on the Advisory Council of the University of San Diego Center for Digital Civil Society, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of software teams.

Have you ever wondered about what makes a good abstraction vs a bad one? Do you want to examine potential reasons why efforts to develop abstractions at a company or in a project take hold, and some don't? Or what it takes to develop an abstraction that reaches beyond the technical corner of your company or project and becomes something that helps actually shape how you think about the entire problem? Understanding the process of developing abstractions, especially as a leader, is really about understanding the process of grief. Even if you get to build the abstraction, it won't be the one you pictured, or envisioned. You're going to need to take the seeds you've born, carefully curated, and lovingly built up over time... And watch them die. To build an abstraction is to hold the heart of your humanity in your hands. Plant your soul into the ground, and be reborn. In this session, I'm going to introduce my thoughts on abstraction, how it works, why it sometimes works and why it sometimes doesn't, and how one can actually take an abstraction and flesh it out to the point where it takes on a life of its own. With that, you should be able to have a better grasp on how ideas can take root in a way that bridges people and domains together.

Hazel Weakly

Hazel spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, automation, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies, across a wide range of tech, and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). She also created the first official Haskell “setup” Github Action and helped turn it into an active community-maintained project. She enjoys traveling to speak at conferences, appearing on podcasts, mentoring others, and sharing what she’s learned with the world. One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves shooting pool and going swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.

Systems thinking is the macro behaviour that we must understand in analyzing our world. A system always produces what it is designed to do, even if that isn't at all what we meant it to do!

Systems are self-maintaining, and contain balancing and/or reinforcing feedback loops.

We'll look at how these work, and what happens when they fail. You'll see how to apply systems thinking to the systems that are all around us.

This is an introductory talk to the world of Systems Thinking, condensed into 45 mins plus time for questions at the end.

From example mapping, to BDD, to DDD practices like event storming and domain storytelling, we're fortunate to have a wide range of tools for collaboratively building domain knowledge and creating models of those domains in software.

One gap that many organisations experience is the management of that domain knowledge over time. Domains evolve. Team members learn new aspects of the domain, or invent more useful models. Team members leave - taking knowledge with them, and new members join but never get the chance to participate in foundational collaborative modelling sessions.

Living documentation is a set of practices to help ensure institutional knowledge is reliable, collaborative and low-effort.

In this session, Chris will do some live domain modelling with volunteers from the audience to demonstrate a new approach to capturing domain knowledge as living documentation, and how to use open source tools like Contextive (https://contextive.tech) to help ensure the knowledge is absorbed, maintained, and relevant over time.

The strongest tech skills don’t necessarily guarantee success. To get the best from those around you—and maximize your own influence—you need to boost your tech skills with soft skills. Luckily, small changes in the way you work can produce big results. In this free webinar, Jacqui Read, author of Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects, takes you on a whistle-stop tour of patterns and techniques to improve your visual, verbal, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills. You’ll learn communication soft skills tuned specifically to a technical audience, which you can easily integrate into your existing workflows for quick and transformative results. You’ll learn how to:

Use soft skills to boost your technical skills Explore visual, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills Integrate communication soft skills into your everyday workflow for transformative results

When building event-driven architectures, one of the challenges we face is coordinating work across many services. How do we implement complex data flows or complex business transactions that consist of multiple asynchronously executed steps? Luckily, there are patterns that can help us manage this complexity: orchestration and choreography. Join us in this fireside chat with Udi Dahan and Laila Bougria as we discuss how each pattern works, the pros and cons of each, and the trade-offs involved when choosing one over the other in specific contexts. See you there!

As systemic complexity increases around us, many technologists are redefining “leadership.” What is technical leadership when good decision-making depends on collective, cross-functional thinking? How is collaborative modeling a form of leadership? What type of leadership does a systems architect provide?

Eb Ikonne, author of “Becoming a Leader in Product Development: An Evidence-Based Guide to the Essentials”, opened our open space event with a keynote. Eb will create the context for our discussions, describing adaptive leadership as something we can practice and a skill we can cultivate. This is the extract of that keynote.

As the relational complexity of software increases, we need, more than ever, smart architecture. Domain-aligned, team-decoupling, cohesiveness-driving, constantly evolving architecture has a massive positive impact. To design systems, we need to evolve the role of “architect” away from the dualistic most-experienced implementor vs ivory tower strategist.

Architecture is a technology-agnostic skillset. You practice it regardless of which tools or programming language you work with. Architecture practice is a solitary, intra-group, and inter-group activity. We practice it within the human system, when we collaboratively design patterns and relationships, empower decision making and construct cross-functional feedback loops. In this talk, we explore:

* “What is an architectural decision?” (The answers might surprise you). * How do we work effectively individually, intra-team, and inter-team to make them? * What is the “advice process” and what has it taught us?