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What Developers Can Learn From Astronauts

My talk is a walk through what we as developers can learn from some of the greatest minds on the planet, their greatest achievements and biggest failures.

If you take one thing away from this session it’s that everyone makes mistakes and forgets important stuff, not just developers. It is important that a field as young as computer science attempts to learn from other industries, and there is really a lot to learn.

Attendees will come out understanding how fallible humans are, and will learn to stop blaming themselves for production issues, and in turn learn how to mitigate problems before they arise. They will learn about the “normalization of deviance", where if bugs and errors don’t break the system they will be ignored until something goes catastrophically wrong.

Most importantly, attendees will learn how it took several days of UAT and management sign off to draw a "risque" shape on Mars.

Monday
2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Room 133

About the presenter:

Sam Atkinson is a developer and technical author, and self describes as, "... most definitely not a space expert, I’m just a senior Java nerd with a background working for banks who happened to read a ton of space books in preparation for a somewhat ambitious talk! It’s been great fun reading in detail about the history of space travel, particularly the space shuttle and the apollo missions. It’s incredible what we as a species are capable of when in competition.

...

It’s my first ever conference talk! So I’m more nervous than excited. I’ve also never been to San Fran which is going to be something off the bucket list."

Last updated: February 6, 2024