Hi, I'm Ines Panker.
I'm a senior staff engineer at Sleuth, a SaaS observability platform (the first engineer they hired, de-facto architect), and the person who just gave this talk.
Almost two decades of building software.
Multi-tenant architecture. Circuit breakers guarding 2-3 million third-party API calls a day across about 40 external APIs. Real-time anomaly detection for hundreds of clients.
Python Go Django Celery PostgreSQL Redis RabbitMQ Elasticsearch LLM agents Conference speaking
LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me.
Why Smart Developers Write Silly Code
Knowing about cognitive biases is like debugging our brain. Devs spend tons of time fixing bugs in code, but biases are the mental bugs that mess with our decisions. They make us overconfident, they make us ignore users and fight for bad ideas. But it needn’t be this way.
References for this talk 📚
- D. Kahneman & A. Tversky, Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures, 1977
- D. Spadini, G. C¸ alikli, and A. Bacchelli, Primers or reminders? The Effects of Existing Review Comments on Code Review, 2020”
- G. Allen and B. J. Parsons, A Little Help can Be A Bad Thing: Anchoring and Adjustment in Adaptive Query Reuse, 2006
- J. Klayman, Y.-W. Ha, Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing, 1987
- Jetzen T, Devroey X., Matton N. and Vanderose B., Towards debiasing code review support, 2024
- Jihun Park, Miryung Kim, Baishakhi Ray, and Doo-Hwan Bae. An empirical study of supplementary bug fixes, 2012
- Kahneman and Lovallo, Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts: A Cognitive Perspective on Risk Taking, 1993
- R. Jain, J. Muro, and K. Mohan, A cognitive perspective on pair programming, 2006
- R. Mohanani, I. Salman, B. Turhan P. Rodriguez & P. Ralph, Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study, 2020
- S. Chattopadhyay, N. Nelson, A. Au, N. Morales, C. Sanchez, R. Pandita, and A. Sarma, A tale from the trenches: cognitive biases and software development, 2020
- Salman I., Turhan B. and Vegas S., A controlled experiment on time pressure and confirmation bias in functional software testing, 2018
- Wikipedia: Anchoring effect
- Wikipedia: Availability heuristic
- Wikipedia: Confirmation bias
- Wikipedia: Optimism bias
- Wikipedia: Status quo bias