Punk Rock Safety

Ep. 17: 21st Century Digital Boy (With Colette Alexander)

Episode Summary

This one's a little different. The title may give some of that away (and it's a Bad Religion song). None of your three hosts are tech wizards, but Collette Alexander joins the pod, and she is (even though she might argue that). Collette has been a professional cellist, worked in software engineering at Spotify, and earned a Masters degree from Lund University in Human Factors. She's got a lot of tattoos, too. There's a lot of banter, but the thing this episode really looks at is how reliability in software compares to other kinds of human work. And there's some thinking about why folks in safety often look at software as a sort of savior (hint: the software people are the first ones to tell you that reliance on software is a pretty fucking bad idea). Collette shares experience with "shallow metrics," iterative design and test environments, and what Dave has named the five Cs. We learned a lot on this one. Software, AI, and digital safety tools are still a weird, wild world - at least if we don't understand the limitations.

Episode Notes

Bad Religion "21st Century Digital Boy"

Oh, and give your money to Punk Rock Saves Lives. They're a rad organization that works in mental health, addiction, and human rights. And they're awesome people who can use your help to keep on kicking ass at what they do.

https://www.punkrocksaveslives.org/