April Wensel is the founder of Compassionate Coding, a socially conscious business that’s bringing emotional intelligence and ethics to the tech industry. She has spent the past decade in software engineering and technical leadership roles at various startups in Silicon Valley. She also teaches coding and mentors technologists around the world. Away from the keyboard, she enjoys picking fruit for the food bank, running ultramarathons, and baking vegan treats.
As developers, we might think we don't have to care about humans because we work on machines. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason for us to build technology is to serve humans.
Therefore, practicing compassion is essential for effective software development. Though many people think of compassion as something soft or ambiguous, you'll learn how compassion provides a practical framework for making rational decisions about our code with the goal of reducing suffering for ourselves, our collaborators, and our users.
From understanding customer pain points all the way down to the level of choosing variable names, applying practical compassion can help us craft better code, improve people's lives, and ultimately find more satisfaction in our work!
Our conference is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion (or lack thereof). We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers.
