Jessica Kerr
She/Her
Biography
Symmathesy is a learning system of learning parts. Jessica Kerr (jessitron) sees software teams this way: as developers, we change this learning system from within. Jessitron works on observability at Honeycomb.io.
Currently, she spends much of her time building symmathesies through Industrial Logic. She has worked at startups (Atomist, Stripe, Outpace) and enterprises (Ford, Bayer, Sprint). She’s programmed in and spoken at conferences about Java, Scala, Clojure, TypeScript, Ruby, and Elm.
Jess lives in St. Louis, MO with two children who invent worlds and draw characters with superpowers, and two cats who meow and knock over water glasses.
NewCrafts Paris 2023
Going Deep on Gamification
Talk
Playing games, we can focus deeply and work really hard and also have a good time. This is what I want out of work, too.
Traditional gamification adds points, competition, and badges to make work appear more game-like. This corrodes collaboration, replacing a deeper meaning with superficial characteristics of games.
We can go deeper: let's talk about how game designers craft an experience for the players, and then apply those principles to the experience of participating in a software team. Games have a lot to teach us, if we look below the surface.
Jessitron brings examples from games, principles of game design, and insight into the nature of software development. Together, this leads to a new way to lead and to live: choosing and designing our own forms of agency.
