thoughtsWhen I began my career in software engineering, I was fueled by the joy of programming and working through unique problems knowing that an answer would be discoverable through my trusty debugger and perseverance. As my career grew in the field, I began to learn more of the challenging constraints with large systems, human organizations, and complexity that seemed untamable. Through additional exposure to these larger problems that no longer could be tackled through the use of my beloved debugger, I began to see how it required different care and feeding at both the personal and team level to overcome these challenges. By investing in these areas, it would invigorate our creative process and deliver ideas that would contradict our traditional thinking.
In this talk, we will explore approaches that I have found to be effective in improving your creative thinking process, bringing diverse ideas into teams, and building a culture of routine learning from different perspectives. From these approaches, we will look at ways to effectively pitch ideas to introduce change in your systems and in your teams, which can breathe life into the possibilities of different solutions to previous difficult challenges. We will also briefly cover things to combat routine costs to the team, which can give more focus on how to tackle the larger problems versus being distracted by the continuous noise that can drain your joy of programming.
After this talk, you will have a series of approaches that you can begin applying immediately to yourself and your team to invigorate your problem-solving approaches. Through my experience, these also bring additional benefits of improved morale and optimism by witnessing new ways to effectively change something. All attendees of this talk will receive a limited edition DevCon 2020 guide on these approaches, which will include rare, never before seen, illustrations by the speaker.