Good abstractions put the hard work where it belongs: on those shipping the API, not on those integrating with it.

The software industry is rife with examples of APIs that place an undue burden on the integrator. Poor design, unclear requirements, short sighted objectives, and failure to encapsulate volatility lead to brittle, fragile systems that are frustrating and costly to extend and maintain. The temptation to deliver leaky abstractions is great since victory can be claimed for "shipping," especially in situations where most stakeholders do not have the design skills and systems training to differentiate a poor abstraction from a good one.

Technical empathy provides a shift in mindset and culture that cultivates greater clarity of responsibility, increases the empowerment of both implementer and integrator, and ultimately helps build and maintain trust between software delivery teams.

This session applies systems thinking, leadership principles and deep industry experience to help software professionals understand the need for technical empathy and how to cultivate it in their own context.

Topics to be explored include:

How a lack of technical empathy plays out
- A.K.A. the state of the software industry
- A.K.A. why it hurts so much

The hard skills of technical empathy
- Information hiding
- Dependency management
- Complexity Containment
- Consistency, Coupling and Cohesion
- Design reviews
- Documentation

The soft skills of technical empathy
- “The problem is people, and the solution is people, and that’s the problem.”
- API design as a human design task
- Examples of poor designs in comparison to good designs
- Organizational design and API design go hand-in-hand

Creating a culture of technical empathy
- Cultivate Trust
- Fight for Clarity
- Reward Empowerment