Empathy is your strength
About me
About me 👧🏽
Born and raised in the Coachella Valley
Huge Latino family
Never got to visit Toys R Us
About me 👩🏽
Live in the Bay Area
Work as a developer
Work on high-end laptop with high-speed Internet all the time
... kinda similar to most of Silicon Valley
Photo Credit: Guner Gulyesil cc by-nc-2.0
Empathy is an important engineering value
As a developer, you have a lot of
technical decisions to make
Your parents don't care about
whitespace debates
Focus on how technical issues affect people
👨👩👧👦👩👩👧👦👨👨👦
Think about people on slow Internet
Rural
No WiFi
Really slow mobile data
Some people rely on mobile, even when it's terrible.
We can write code to make it better for them.
#perfmatters
Think about people with poor vision
Poor vision runs in the family
- Both parents work jobs where they're outside
- Reading glasses aren't always on hand
- Contrast can also be an issue where they miss icons
Accessibility guidelines allow them to do this
👉🏽
Checkout WCAG to build for:
- Screenreader access
- Photosensitivity
- Colorblindness
- Subtitles / Audio
- More
Empathy for your team means bringing this up nicely
How I advocate
- I know my team mates
- Bring facts, personas, or personal experiences
- Do trainings to reach other teams
- When it sucks, remember you're doing it for others
So how about you?
How to get a nutrition app to communities at risk for diabetes?
Encourage your team to do right by IE users and legacy devices
Include unit tests for cases like this
Your empathy will make you a better engineer
Thank you!
Questions/Comments
@kimberlymunoz
Empathy is your strength
By Kimberly Munoz
Empathy is your strength
A short presentation on how empathy for our communities makes us better developers.
