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