BIOGRAPHY

Laura is a well-rounded iOS developer who's coded a range of projects, from Khan Academy's large-scale education app to business-to-business custom project management solutions. She draws on her formal background in human languages and pedagogy to bring a fresh perspective to her teams and codebases, and maintains an active community presence by teaching and mentoring programmers around the world.

Talk

Readable Code

You've written in many languages since your first "hello world"–but how did you become fluent? And now that you're more senior, how well do your teammates understand the code you write? We'll draw parallels between human languages & code–and show how willpower & empathy can improve fluency in both.

We'll dive into the skills & contexts that are needed for learning new languages & ideas, and investigate how to apply those to code we write. We'll map the course from an excited beginner to a sometimes world-weary expert; we'll discuss how to respond when a team member says they don't understand our code; we'll talk about the role that working memory & energy play in comprehension; and we'll have a grand time exploring idiosyncrasies from human languages around the globe.