Printmaking, origami, and bookbinding sound like activities on the day’s arts-and-crafts agenda at camp, not a developer conference. That is, unless you’re Heroku, the Salesforce-owned app platform, which pointedly included crafting demonstrations at its recent Waza 2013 conference in San Francisco yesterday. While the crafts made the event fun and provided respite from lengthy workshop lectures, they were more than a diversion. They also represented Heroku’s sense of itself as a people-focused shop that crafts artisanal code: software where art and science come together.
If you didn’t know any better, you might arrive at Waza thinking you had stumbled into a yoga convention, thanks to the self-consciously Zen-like atmosphere and abundance of coconut water. Attendees were kept calm and centered with Blue Bottle coffee stations, string lights, power-charging hubs and a convention space filled with manicured shrubbery and other greenery.
“We’re trying to make developers’ lives better, and we do that internally at our offices with the products we make,” says Heroku COO Oren Teich. “Waza is an external expression of the vision.”
Being a tech conference, there were the requisite keynotes and programming language workshops. But the crafting demonstrations stole the show, judging by the crowds that gathered around each table for lessons on bookbinding, printmaking, origami, computer-controlled Zen gardening, quilt-making, and Arduino programming. Every station invited conference goers to get their hands dirty and spend time making something, whether that meant carving out a piece of linoleum to make a print or adding stitches to a quilt that will hang in Heroku’s new offices.
“We’re treating software development as a craft, and I tend to think of the term ‘craft’ as an intersection of art and science,” says Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins. “The crafting stations are representation of that.”
Instead of filling the entire conference with talks about programming technique, Teich felt it was more important to bring in outside activities to broaden coders’ horizons. “We as developers have the opportunity to become better at a our craft, and the way we do things as humans,” says Teich, “Why do we care about crafts? Because I want you to be thinking not just about ‘how do I write the best line of code,’ but ‘how do I open myself up to world of what’s possible.’”
Ruby developer Mario Izquierdo, who we found at the printmaking station, was pleased with the craft demos, saying he felt printmaking would help him in his own work.
At the quilting station instructor Maura Grace Ambrose encouraged participants to use their needles in different ways to get different stitches, teaching that one tool can produce different results based on your technique.
Teich believes those small lessons add up to make everyone better at their own craft, whether that’s coding or anything else. “If you’re just working with what you know, you have a very narrow view of the world, but if you can look at origami or printmaking, you’re going to be a better programmer.”
Heroku co-founder James Lindenbaum says he hoped attendees left feeling inspired, by both the technical lectures and the crafts, to create more. From talking to the crowd, and watching them throw back a few craft beers courtesy of San Francisco brewery 21st Amendment, we can say for certain they at least left Waza happy. Namaste.
Getting Crafty: Why Coders Should Try Quilting and Origami
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Getting Crafty: Why Coders Should Try Quilting and Origami
