Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code

This workshop presents a few ideas about people and society that programmers ought to know. All of the material is available under an open license, and contributions through our repository are welcome. All participants are required to respect our Code of Conduct.

Learner Persona

• Jay is 21, white, straight, and male. He got into programming because he enjoys solving puzzles, and still daydreams about being the next Mark Zuckerberg. His favorite phrase in arguments is, "Well, actually…"
• Jay would deny being racist, homophobic, or misogynist, but makes disparaging jokes about "cancel culture" and "DEI hires" to fit in with his peers. Those jokes increasingly make Jay feel uncomfortable, as does the gap between the Silicon Valley rhetoric in his company and what he sees every day on the news.
• Jay is therefore looking for an explanation of how society actually works, particularly one that explains why everything seems to be getting worse.
• Jay is impatient with abstract theory; he strongly prefers understanding he can apply.

This workshop teaches Jay a few key ideas from psychology, sociology, and political science, while the exercises help him figure out how these ideas apply to tech.

Lessons

Appendices

Acknowledgments

• Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto, Canada. He was the co-founder and first Executive Director of Software Carpentry and received ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator Award in 2020.

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