Assumed audience: People interested in how we can make good software. In more than one sense of the phrase “good software”. That mean

Seeing Like a Programmer (LambdaConf 2024) — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho

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2024-11-01 11:30:07

Assumed audience: People interested in how we can make good software. In more than one sense of the phrase “good software”. That means not just software engineers.

A bit of context: Today I gave the second of two talks at LambdaConf 2024: exploring what we can do to make our software better… and also what to do to make better software. As the title might suggest, it explicitly draws on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State; it also draws extensively on Peter Naur’s “Programming as Theory-Building”, Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, and more.

This is the best talk I have ever given, and also by far the most important. I am incredibly proud of it, and if you find it helpful or thought-provoking, I would really love it if you shared it. You don’t need to be a software engineer or even to know all that much about software to appreciate this talk, and some of the people I think need to hear it most are people who work with software engineers but who are not themselves software engineers.

And if you like, you can read the talk as I prepared it. (Note that this is a script, not a transcript, so you will note some differences from the video above!)