I was recently invited to give my “Empathy Driven Development” talk at Silicon Labs for their annual Technical Symposium. This is an idea and a talk I developed at iRobot while trying to come up with a general list of software best practices. The idea grew and evolved over the years, and I’m pretty happy with where it’s at now.

TL;DR:

1. As engineers, most of our job is communicating with other humans, including our future selves.
2. Using empathy is an effective way to communicate better.
3. Anyone can learn to have more empathy.
4. Using empathy scales up very well.
5. Profit.

I’m happy to be able to share a video recording of the talk: “Empathy Driven Development” on YouTube

I hope you can watch it and get something useful out of it.

Silicon Labs is a great company: I worked there twice, and enjoyed the work and the people both times. It was a lot of fun (virtually) connecting with many of my former colleagues again.

Thanks to everyone at Silicon Labs for putting on a great conference, and for letting me be a part of it.