McLuhan's Law
Marshall McLuhan told us among other things that “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” If this is true, we should be very careful with the tools that we expose ourselves to because they will determine the way we are going to think.
Quick question: did you check your phone within 5 minutes of waking up this morning? Likely, yes. Yet, this seemingly imperious need did not exist before the iPhone brought it in our world.
The tools we use have a deep influence on our behavior. This is particularly relevant in our increasingly digital world, and it has a critical impact in the way we approach software. Just think of this: software is data, and data has no particular shape. Yet we as humans require shape to be able to reason about something. But, the shape of software is provided by our tools. This means that we must scrutinize the tools we use and make our choices with as much care as we do any other significant architectural choice.
In this talk, we show examples of how the tools influence the way we think, and look carefully at how we should equip our environment to foster better software.
About Tudor Gîrba
Tudor Gîrba (tudorgirba.com) is a software environmentalist and co-founder of feenk.com where he works with an amazing team on the Glamorous Toolkit, a novel IDE that reshapes the Development eXperience (gtoolkit.com).
He built all sorts of projects like the Moose platform for software and data analysis (moosetechnology.org), and he authored a couple of methods like humane assessment (humane-assessment.com). In 2014, he also won the prestigious Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his research (aito.org). This was a surprising prize as he is the only recipient that was not a university professor, even if he does hold a PhD from the University of Bern from a previous life.
These days he likes to talk about moldable development. If you want to see how much he likes that, just ask him if moldable development can fundamentally change how we approach software development.
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