European Software developers
I'll be looking around wondering where the mad scientist is just call me Sal that's fine and this talk came about a couple of things kind of came together so I've been in IT over 25 years I've been a developer my first one of my first jobs out of university was developing middleware for real time process control systems for nuclear power stations. That have also done some work in the water board I've been a developer designer analyst I've been a project manager and [Music] I've been doing kind of lean agile stuff for like the last 15 years or so and also got a PhD and my PhD or that comes from laboratory where it kind of. Actually should be classed as computer science and artificial intelligence I specialized in the psychology of collaborative software banking development so I have a background in in in cognitive psychology and collaboration as well and I as part of my PhD I did lots and lots of research found that lots of really interesting things about how you know how the brain tames this incredibly complex domain. That we were work in and and then I cut that kind of went by the by I and I went back to work after I finished my PhD and carried on doing stuff and about 10 years later some folks kind of said to me hey so I'm sure you did some some some research on the pair programming where is it I can't find it so I started blogging again and as I started blogging. I realized that there's all kinds of things we know about there's some fantastic bits of software research we know about how people develop software so I got kind of back into that and back re-infused about that and then at the same time as this was happening a couple years ago my eldest son who's now 11 got diagnosed with autism and as a research I was like wow fascinating right and he's go and find out everything.
Software developer life
I can possibly can about about the autistic spectrum and and what it means to him to be autistic and the more I read and the more I looked and so I was kind of watching talks and and reading and going to meetings and training courses and all that kind of stuff really immersing myself in in in the autistic literature and the autistic world and it all started to seem a bit familiar. Actually and I started to read things and think how do you know what I think I do that or I think I think I think like that or I think I struggle with that and so I started to wonder whether I might have I might be autistic teen and I'm pretty lucky my sister my younger sister has a double doctorate in software and she's a clinical psychologist so that's quite handy so I phoned her up and said yes you know that's that's diagnosis. I've been reading stuff I think I might be on the autistic spectrum what do you think and my sister said oh well she's very diplomatic my sister so she said well I don't know if you absolutely get a formal diagnosis but you've definitely got lots of traits so that's like it yes really from her she's just being polite so things like um so so I thought okay that's quite interesting and then. I went online and I did some tests so here I am this is this is the data so this is the aq testing autistic quotient test you can take it online it's created by Simon baron-cohen from the University of Cambridge where you can see there the dotted line that's the control group so people who aren't diagnosed with autism this straight line is people with diagnosed as autistic and that's me so I score 41 which is quite impressive I think and then this is the RIP vote s so this is a test that's preferred by some and particularly clinicians because it gets really good interrater reliability and you can see here that the threshold values the suspected autism is in the total score is 65 and I score a whopping a hundred and 55 so and that's and you can see again how that relates to various you know various different sectors and different things so that's that's this year I retook that test so I struggle with things