What Is Identity? by Janelle Klein

Imagine your brain’s logic is written in code. You fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint in the “Identity” class, and inspect your brain’s internal state. What are the state variables? What does the code look like? How do we fix the bugs? In this talk, we’ll explore brand new territory — how to use software as a metaphor to understand the human brain. You’ll learn a new language of metaphorical shapes to describe the “Architecture of Identity,” then we’ll examine some of the key dysfunctions in our organizations through this lens. As engineers, we pour our hearts into our work, and our creation becomes an extension of ourselves. As a team, we turn into a family, raising a child, and we dream about how our baby will grow up to be beautiful and awesome. We sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of our child, because it’s pre-wired into our DNA. Unfortunately, when our beautiful creation gets stomped on by the dysfunctional machine of business, we’re heartbroken from the whole identity-crushing experience. Who we are, what we believe in, and why we care so deeply about our craft, is at the foundation of what it means to be an engineer. Janelle is an artist of paint, music, and software who uses software as a metaphor for life. After researching “Idea Flow” (leanpub.com/ideaflow), Janelle turned into a hobbyist cognitive scientist, obsessed with understanding brains. Right now, she’s working on building a human brain simulator based on her research that will be the core tech behind her new venture, Open Mastery (http://openmastery.org). Aside from Open Mastery and brains, Janelle is a NFJS tour speaker, and for the last 15 years has been a developer, consultant, and CTO. Her focus has been data-intensive analytic systems, Continuous Delivery infrastructure, database automation, test automation strategies, and helping companies identify and solve their biggest problems.