Keynote

The attentive programmer

Friday, May 24

09:00 - 10:00
RoomsSpaghetti, Lasagna, Tagliatelle
LanguageEnglish
Abstract

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed”, said the great photographer Garry Winogrand. The genius of his work lies in his phenomenal powers of attention, his ability to see. Seeing is a deliberate act. What do programmers “see”? How well do we do it? And are we so full of intention that we fail to pay attention? I want to pursue this question, with the aid of philosophers, poets and photography, and I want to light up a potential dimension in programming that I haven’t seen explored. For example: why is it that a story or photograph can be about something, but we never hear of a computer program that is about something? Is it not possible? Or have we just missed it? We’re all familiar with love poems and love songs - could a love program exist? What would it look like? I think we can answer all those questions in interesting ways, that connect our understanding and appreciation of the world and our arts with programming. I think that they can suggest new opportunities and ideas to us. And, I think that it can make a difference to us, even as practically-minded programmers doing practical work.

Participant

Daniele Procida

I am a Director of Engineering at Canonical, where I lead the company’s ambitions to establish documentation as a first-class engineering practice. I enjoy helping organise community conferences for Python and Django, and helping people and open-source projects improve their documentation. I have a special passion for the pan-African Python movement and have been lucky to participate in multiple African PyCons. I am the author of the Diátaxis framework https://diataxis.fr/, which has become an influential approach to documentation in software and other domains.