Some Craft Conf breakfast session citations

One of the best things that can happen at a conference is a thing you can't plan for but only hope to encounter: a really good spontaneous conversation that erupts after or alongside the formal programming. I had such a conversation the morning after the end of Craft Conf, and I'm still thinking about it!

Across discussion that ranged from the nature of cognition, conceptions of developer problem-solving and programming ability, to neurodiversity and gendered experiences in tech, we all threw around any number of names, citations, pieces of work we've read. I promised to share some of the ones I mentioned myself and a blogpost was the best way I could figure to do this, so here is my annotated breakfast bibliography!

• I mentioned Alison Gopnik and her work on cognition. She has several fun books, and I referenced this paper on children vs LLMs. She has a more recent piece as well on LLMs as cultural technologies.

• I mentioned Sapna Cheryan and her work on the defaults in workplaces and how they encode certain expectations as well as distort how we evaluate others. I find this particular paper very helpful but another interesting paper relevant to our conversation is on sense of mattering.

• In discussing how we assess ability at scale and how the accurate assessment of ability is itself a thing that is inequitably distributed, I referenced this paper on how social biases can produce systematic underestimation of ability. This can also be seen in the differential rewards that people get for different levels of achievement based on their social identities (e.g., in a penalized group you have to achieve at a higher level to compete with people in an advantaged group, who may get the same benefit for lower achievement as you need the highest levels of achievement to unlock)

• I mentioned my own work with Ana Hevesi on cumulative cultures as a frame for software innovation which is built on the work of many excellent scientists I admire such as cross-cultural work on problem-solving and innovation, as well as cognitive science challenging old stereotypes about how things like the executive functions work and group differences in them.

• Relevant to the unpacking of stereotypes, I referenced this recent paper on communication among autistic people which points out the bias in deficit framings of differences (where it has been assumed that neurotypical people don't have their own deficits, which they do!) and provides a different, strengths-based perspective on one particular topic.

• This led us to discuss how social interactions and our sense of other people are fundamentally constructed and shared and that locating explanations "inside of individuals" is often extremely misleading. Our No Silver Bullets paper makes this point as well, on the level of software metrics variables!