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RubyConf 2015

Keynote #1

Carina Zona

Algorithms have consequences on people

MarIO

Target:

If we wanted to figure out if someone was pregnant, even it they didn't want us to know, could you do that?

As long as we don't spook her it works

Shutterfly thinks you had a baby.

Inadvertent Algorithmic cruelty

Works most of the time, but not all the time

Be humble

We cannot intuit inner state, emotions, private subjectivity

Accidental algo run-ins

  • Out of the user's control

Tools used to make film, the science of it, are not racially neutral

  • optimized for white skin with Shirley cards

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent - Alan Turing

Using a black box for decisions is regressive, to fairness and equality.

Flipping the paradigm

Consider Decisions' potential impacts

  • Project the likelihood
  • minimize negative consequences
  • Not unlike the hippocratic oath

Be honest and trustworthy

  • Build in recourse for a wrong conclusion
  • disclosure of limitations

Be visionary about countering bias

Anticipate diverse ways to screw up

Cultivate informed consent

Audit outcomes constantly

  • track bias in your own black box

Commit to data trasnperency and algo transparency

Do not build without understanding consequences to others

How to stop hating your tests

@searls

  • Tests make big objects harder to manage

Rule of Product

  • test combo of all params

Test can do 3 things:

  • sets up (Given)
  • invokes (When)
  • verifies (Then)

rspec-given

Sandi Metz's Squint test

Test Isolation

  • Unfocused tests
  • Too realistic tests
    • slower
    • take time to write/change
    • so many moving parts
  • Redundant code coverage
  • Careless mocking
    • Treats symptoms of test pain, not cause
  • Application Frameworks
    • encourage only integration tests

Test Feedback

  • Useless messages
    • Bad messages provide wasted time
    • judge message quality of tools
  • Slow loops
    • limits the tasks you can do in a day
  • Painful Data
  • Test Durations
  • False negatives
    • Unfinished tests
    • erode confidence in tests
    • redundent coverage, slow tests cause false negatives

TL;DR Fewer integration tests

@testdouble

Seven Rightous Fights

1. Localization

  • Don't hard code labels
  • Support extra types of characters

2. Security

  • Not cheap/easy, but beats the alternative
  • Authentication is not Authorization is not security
  • Leave room for encryption
  • Be able to delete users
    • Delete data after 7 years or so

3. Extensibility

4. Documentation

  • needs to be more useful than stack overflow
  • They are not state secrets, they are subtle self promotion
  • Good for dev on-boarding
  • Good for build procedures

5. Affordance

  • what your software is trying to get people to do
  • Software that creates good behavior w/ minimal user effort
  • You're never going to fix it later

6. Acceptance

  • Find actual users
  • Don't tell them how to do it, see how they understand it themselves
  • if you can't hire an expert, become a student

7. Accessibility

  • Not everyone uses the retina screens we do
  • We're only temporarily able-bodied, so do it for yourself

Now What?

  • Style guides
  • brown bag lunches
  • pair programming best practices
  • add tests for accessibility and usability
  • cultivate diversity and representation on your teams
  • ask questions

Section 508: no money if not ADA compliant

Advice for winning: make it about money

Soft Typing

Mostly live coding an interpreter to understand types, which is here:

github.com/jcinnamond/trump

I estimate this talk will take 20 mins, give or take 10 mins

www.noelrappin.com

Bad estimates are not unique to software

What if we just did stuff and got paid?
  • Customers reasonably expect estimates

Estimates are communication

  • Communicates the investment
  • Communicates progress
  • Communicates scope
  • Bad estimates communicate bad things
    • unrealistic expectations
    • way too much
    • allows for micromanaging

Estimates at the beginning is the WORST

  • Like guessing time to the airport if you don't know where it is or if you even need to fly

Kind-of Estimate Theory

Estimating Projects vs. Estimating Features

  • Nobody cares about feature estimates
    • Only useful in aggregate
  • Only care about when users can use stuff
  • Estimates are probabalistic

What makes estimates go wrong?

  • Bad assumptions
  • scope creep
  • Unknown complexity
  • Rework
  • sometimes there's pressure

Developers are optimists

A lower estimate doesn't make it less complex

How to do better

Don't chase false precision

What goes into estimate:

  • Complexity of the task
    • We're bad at estimating time on a task
  • Skill of dev
    • De-moralizing if personal
    • Consistent
  • time on task
    • Devs are pretty good at estimating this

Estimate complexity and let time sort itself out == point

  • Everything else being consistent, the number of points per iteration becomes the most useful

Key point: decompose problem into smaller stories

The above doesn't help a one-off estimates

The worst way to estimate

Fake your velocity in the beginning.

Don't chase precision here.

What you'll get is a range

Round point estimates upwards

Clearly describe the limits to your estimate

Keynote: Stupid Ideas for Many Computers

Worst Ideas Evar -- Aaron Patterson

http://github.com/thagomizer/stupidideas thagomizer.com

Keynote: Leagues of Sea and Sky

Augmented reality!!!

Sea

Lunar distance used to calc longitutude was not simple way back when

Keeping track of the point of sunset was ok, if you could keep time in different places.

  • John Harrsion built a sea clock and asked to has it tested, tests it on fleet to Lisbon
  • Builds a second sea clock, then 17 years building a 3rd
    • Figures out how to bring it down to the size of a pocketwatch
    • SMASHING success on trans-atlantic voyage
  • Design was stolen by new Royal Astronomer
  • King George forces them to pay the prize for longitude
    • they pay most of the prize money, but dissolve the prize entirely
  • John Harrison worked as a recluse
    • could've worked together for better results
    • both these methods now guide spacecraft

Aviation

Most people only saw early flight in stunt shows, which doesn't convince them to try it in any way.

Charles Lindbergh one of the earliest Air Mail pilots

No one tried in first 5 years of prize for NYC - Paris

No one sold Lindbergh a plane, so he has an inexperienced engineer (Donald Paul) to build one: The Spirit of St. Louis.

Lindbergh super famous when he comes home.

  • Donald Paul is not, is left out of celebrations
  • Talks only about the plane, gives no realy credit to the engineers who built it.

Sky(ish)

Put a robot on Mars!!

We explore by physical presence, which is hard to do for the planets.

  • Exploring planets through screens is hard, and leads to erroneous models of those planets
  • Video games can be useful tools, they're designed to make us feel like we're elsewhere

Virtual Reality can be really, really effective.

Focus on the people you're encountering, and how you might work with new people.

@drjeffnorris

The Not So Rational Programmer

Our brain is a legacy system

  • Powerful
  • bad documentation
  • no error handling
  • no access to source code

Cognitive bias: heuristics the brain uses to make very quick decisions, especially in a pinch.

You'll recognize a person and their emotional state far faster/easier than you'd solve 17 x 24

Uses cognitive bias to approximate results that are ok most of the time

You can't turn it off, and you can't always know when it's happening

Personal Decision Making

Confirmation Bias

search for/interpret info in a way the confirms preconceptions

  • might get angry if preconception is challenged
Practice challenging your own opinion
  • use devil's advocate if needed

Mere Exposure Effect

  • Undue liking for things merely because we're familiar with them
  • Cognitive Ease
  • Cognitive Strain
    • something we find that we're not familiar with
    • seen as a potential threat up front, requires more effort
      • fewer errors, much slower
  • Objective Criteria can be helpful for evaluation
  • Personal Impression, only as support
  • Seperate evaluation/execution

Team Decision Making

False Consensus Effect

Overestimating the degree to which people think like or agree with me.

  • We project our own assumptions on other people
    • Stronger when we're a part of the same group
  • Be explicity to mitigate the effect
  • Encourage questions
  • Collect opinions first

Groupthink

members try to minimize conflict to reach consensus w/o evaluation, to preserve harmony

  • Changing or discarding own opinions to fit this
    • limits critical and independant thinking
  • Evolutionarily developed
Factors to groupthink
  • highly cohesive

  • structural faults

    • isolated
    • homogenous members
  • situational context

    • perceived threats
    • recent failures
  • Have diverse teams in demographics and viewpoints

  • Encourage critical evaluation

  • Don't prime a discussion by stating your own opinions

  • Get outside opinions

  • appoint a devil's advocate

When we all think alike, then no one is thinking - Walter Lippman

It's ok to change your opinion based on new or updated info

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. -Daniel Kahneman

@laura_nobilis

Hacking Spacetime for a successful career

@tehviking

Achievement is a system of control

  • It's somebody else's rules

Technician Track

likes tools and techniques asks how focuses on tactics

Manager

fascination with people asks who what where when

Entrepreneur

likes gaps in the world asks why focus on vision and invention

What word do you do when you're stressed?

Invest in yourself and others

  1. You can opt of the the cycle
  2. Your preferences are your friends
  3. Build the platform you want to live with

Manage your energy, not your time

@jmmastey

People are working so very much, foregoing time off.

When demand exceeds capacity, we make the easy choices.

Not quantity of time, but quality of energy.

  1. Pay Attention to energy
  2. Get energy
  3. Spend it wisely
  4. Recharge it better

Get Energy

  • Get enough sleep, and restorative sleep
  • exercise, at least a little
  • eat well
  • should have short-lived, moderate levels of stress

Spent it wisely

  • willpower does not diminish, unless you believe it does
  • multi-tasking is like the cake - a lie
  • procrastinate less

Recharge it better

Rest is not idleness, Idleness is not rest

Alternate activity and rest

Take some damn time off - Joe

Using Ruby In Security Critical Apps

Tom Macklin

The Reasonable Expectations of Your CTO, Software Craftsmanship 2012

Assuring is not good, but evident assurances let other people decide for themselves

The right controls in the right places with the right assurances.

NEAT

Non-bypassible

Evaluatable

Always Invoked

Tamper Evident

Some takeaways

  • abstract OS "hooks" with FFI
  • stub OS controls for development
  • don't give your app system priveleges

tmacklin

How to Performance

@eileencodes

benchmarking: how slow it is profiling: what is slow

Get a baseline

github.com/eileencodes/integration_performance_test

time is not a good baseline to use

gem benchmark-ips

Find the culprits

gem ruby-prof

  • lots of options
  • CallStackPrinter visualizes call stack

gem StackProf

  • more focused profiling

Always Be Benchmarking

Turns out OSX is awful at measuring CPU time use wall time

RubyVM.stat

AllocationTracer tool

Know your tools, use multiple tools

speakerdeck.com/eileencodes

Learn to make music with Ruby

@darinwilson

Sonic-pi.net

https://gist.github.com/darinwilson/137764d4b06072de626c

60 == middle C, can use :C4

each integer represents a half-step note

sleep takes a number of beats to rest as an arg

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