Keynote: Become a Better Programmer by Using Words and Ideas From Casual Gaming - Kate Gregory ACCU
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Keynote: Grinding, Farming, and Alliances - Become a Better Programmer by Using Words and Ideas From Casual Gaming - Kate Gregory ACCU 2023
Slides: https://accu.org/conf-previous/accu2023/
If you play a game once in a while, you've levelled up in it. You've completed a quest, a mission, a level, or something. And you've been rewarded. Some of the mechanisms that are carefully coded into games are very similar to mechanisms that happen in our careers. In this talk I'll use the language of games (quests, loot) to talk about advancing and succeeding as a developer, however you define success.
Every game has a core mechanic: winning battles, solving puzzles, finding matches, or whatever. In the same way, being a software developer involves a lot of writing code. But our careers involve a lot of other activities, too. Sometimes it's not clear what the value of a meeting is, why you should join a committee or working group in your company or outside it, how social media can have relevance for a developer, why conferences are worthwhile, and so on. It's rare for people to spell out the benefits of any work activity explicitly. I will show some of those benefits using the concepts and language that are common across a variety of games today,
In a game, you have to make decisions on the fly as new information arises. You may have to communicate plans to other people, without authority to make them follow the plan, and you may have to choose a path without all the information you need to make the decision. Surely that sounds familiar to programmers?
If you've figured out some meta-play that works for you in a game you like, you can do the same for your software development career.
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Kate Gregory
Kate Gregory is an enthusiastic C++ programmer and teacher, and has been paid to program since 1979. She believes that software should make our lives easier. That includes making the lives of developers easier! She'll stay up late arguing about deterministic destruction or how modern C++ is not the C++ you remember. She is one of the three leads of the Carbon Language project, a founder of #include , and on the board of C++ Toronto, which runs CppNorth.
Kate runs a small consulting firm in rural Ontario and provides mentoring and management consultant services, as well as writing code every week. She has spoken all over the world, written over a dozen books, and helped thousands of developers to be better at what they do. Kate is a Visual C++ MVP, and develops courses for Pluralsight, primarily on C++.
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