Unpacking Technical Decisions

About this presentation

Every day, we make hundreds of small technical decisions: what’s the best way to implement this? Where should this function live? Is this library worth using? Occasionally, we make a larger decision: would a different framework make us more productive? Should we rewrite the whole thing in C? No matter what scale we’re talking about, our decision making leans heavily on past experience, our community, and usually a search engine. But beyond that, the process is mostly opaque. Two programmers, given the same data, often make different decisions. We all want to be the one who’s usually right, but…how do we get there? Let’s unpack our technical decision-making process, and see what we can learn about getting better at programming. Is mastery really something you just have to wait for? Can you accelerate it? And just what does “productivity” mean, anyway? We’ll take a tour of the science and figure out how we can apply it to the decisions we make every day.