Community & CareerCommunity & Career
Conference45min
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Language Games

This talk examines the persistent challenges of communication for software engineers, both with people and computers. It introduces practical frameworks to improve communication, argues that human interactions are harder than coding, and emphasizes that imperfect communication is normal, offering strategies to ease collaboration and software development.

Eli Holderness
Eli HoldernessThe Bennett Institute

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Wednesday, April 1, 11:45-12:30
Zaal 3
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Communication: it's the oldest problem we have. It's already hard enough to talk to people, but as software engineers we have to talk to computers as well - often at the same time. Getting communication wrong leads to problems anywhere between 'my code is buggy' to 'this project is 6 months overdue and doesn't meet any of the requirements'. There are thousands of books, webinars and conference talks out there about how to communicate more effectively, and we still haven't figured it out.

In this talk, I'll take you through some rigorous frameworks for thinking about communication, and explain how they can help you talk both to people and to computers. I'll argue that it's actually much easier to communicate with computers than other human beings, and that the inability to communicate perfectly isn't a failure - it's normal. Finally, I'll talk about what all of this means for us as engineers, designers and producers of software, and what we can do to make all our lives a little easier.
communication
computers
engineers
frameworks
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Eli Holderness

Eli Holderness

The Bennett Institute

United Kingdom

Eli has been in tech since being released back into the wild from studying maths at university 9 years ago. They've spent their time working in industries ranging from telecoms to biotech to analog circuit design to developer advocacy, continually getting nerd-sniped along the way. These days, they work at the Bennett Institute as a Research Software Advocate, helping to build the next generation of healthcare research tooling. In their spare time, they like to go bouldering, knit and sew, and hang out with their cat.

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