Making impact with your craft with sociotechnical design •Xin Yao • CodeCrafts 2024

This presentation was recorded at Code Crafts 2024
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If you have worked in the software industry for a while, you’ll have a hunch that technical skills are often not what stands between us and our success. Around software systems, there are always complex human systems, whose runtime dynamics seems full of fixes that don’t work. As software professionals, can we just tell jokes about SAFe, about being able to copy the Spotify Model, but not paste it? Or should we give the usual shrug - “it’s the system’s fault”? Xin has been a design and architecture practitioner for more than a decade. Drawing on her own developmental journey, Xin makes a case for the rising relevance of sociotechnical design in a post-modern world, where aging companies struggle with aging software, while adding new software and complexity to their IT portfolio. With good attractor effect, practices like Domain-Driven Design(DDD), Systems Thinking and Constraints Framework are evolving into a multi-dimensional, sociotechnical design toolbox. From a systems standpoint, we are part of the same mess. If we can become better at seeing and naming the elephants in the room, not as random events, but as systemic patterns described through a consistent systems language, then the current messy reality is no longer our enemy but our ally. It can become a generative force for us to identify leverage and sustain influence, making better impact with our craft. Join Xin to reflect together on, how DDD and adjacent practices can be leveraged as powerful enabling constraints to help us see the system, share the system, and build the system in a reality of vast sociotechnical complexity and constant change.
Stay humble, & build great software!
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