Alvaro Videla - Literary Theory looks at Readable Code

[videlalvaro]

Título

Literary Theory looks at Readable Code

Descripción

Programming is a human communication activity. We want to minimize
misunderstandings in our code to be able to work effectively as
teams. This means we need to learn how to look at our code to spot
areas where we could improve our communication skills. We want to get
our ideas across. We want that our abstractions, our models, make
sense to others.

Literature is a discipline with a long track record of authors and
researchers trying to find out how to make writing communication
effective. What could we learn from them?

In this talk I want to explore the relation between the process of
writing computer programs with that of writing literary works of
fiction. In particular I want to show some ideas presented by Umberto
Eco in his book Lector in Fabula, seeing how we can improve knowledge
sharing via our code, tests, documentation, and other artifacts.

The goal is to learn the skills required to help others understand how
we made decisions about the tradeoffs in our code, like choosing
abstractions, deciding on the level of performance required, or the
amount of documentation needed for a project.

Bio

Alvaro Videla works as Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft Azure. A
former RabbitMQ core-dev, before moving to Europe he used to work in
Shanghai where he helped building one of Germany biggest dating
websites. He co-authored the book "RabbitMQ in Action" for Manning
Publishing. Some of his open source projects can be found here:
http://github.com/videlalvaro. Apart from code related stuff he likes
traveling with his wife, listening/playing music and reading
books. You can find him on Twitter as @old_sound.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4ZNkuaU9OJgbnlqaC1iclNzb1U/view?usp=sharing

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