Tech Nott July 2018: Dungeons, Dragons & Developers and Making The World Better
Small Steps To A Better World: Content Warnings And Socially Responsible Practice by Will Ellwood
How do you market technology in a world of technology addicts, and how should technology companies be utilise their marketing teams to achieve the best results?
This talk focuses on how to approach marketing both niche and broad technology products, and talks about how technology businesses can better support their marketing teams, improve how they communicate and be better at reaching their customers.
Will’s talk was describing the setting up of content warnings for the Strange Horizons website to inform readers if the content contained anything which could be considered objectionable, this being a social responsibility towards visitors to the Strange Horizons website.
Examples of content warnings would be the BBFC classifications or PEGI warnings. These can be either wide ranging warnings or more granular warnings about specific content in articles.
The content warnings were implemented as a Wordpress plug in which created a pop open section at the top of articles to inform the reader about the content. This site used to be hosted on Wordpress but I found it too fiddly to generate simple content so I moved the site to GitHub instead. From the description of the Wordpress plug in development that sounds quite fiddly too!
Dungeons, Dragons & Developers by Matt Brunt
You enter the dungeon, as the echoes of your footsteps sound around you, something catches your eye - is that… oh, oh no.
You grab your trusty sword and with your fellow adventurers, you seek to overcome the mighty challenge that lays ahead of you: building software.
This talk is a look at some of the parallels between Dungeons and Dragons, and software development.
We’ll see how lessons learned through delving into dungeons and fighting monsters with a party of adventurers can help teams of developers when building software in the real world.
Are you ready to join me in a mighty quest for better software?
Matt’s talk was about Dungeons and Dragons being a way of describing and thinking about software development. (Sadly I didn’t get a photo of Matt’s wizard hat)
Dungeons are the environment in which software development takes place. Dragons are the problems that need solving and the Dungeon Master sets the scene and provides steering nudges to the players or software engineers.
Various player classes were described corresponding to real world team members such as Wizards, Rogues, Fighters and etc. for different types of people bringing different skills to software development.
Quests and the importance of keeping the party working towards their shared goal were presented plus the importance of integrating new team members, all in all a very enjoyable and amusing talk!