Digging into the Matrix: Practicing Code Archaeology w/ Art Doler

Abstract:

Most of the code that exists in the world is code you didn’t write, and so most of the code you work with is also code you didn’t write, even if you’re not working with a legacy system. But when we don’t understand that code, we can all too often dismiss, disparage, or even simply delete it - and that’s a mistake!
Almost all the code we interact with was written by other humans, and they wrote the code that way for a reason. If we take the time to understand the context and the story behind a piece of code, we can infer a lot about what those humans meant to achieve, what their culture was like, and what they valued… in other words, we need to become an archaeologist!

Bio:
Arthur (or Art, take your pick) has been a software engineer for 20 years and has worked on things as exciting as analysis software for casinos and things as boring as banking websites. He is an advocate for talking openly about mental health and psychology in the technical world, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how we program and why we program, and about the tools, structures, cultures, and mental processes that help and hinder us from our ultimate goal of writing amazing things. His hair is brown and his thorax is a shiny blue color.

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