Ally Kelly McKnight

Ally is a software engineer at NoRedInk. On any given day you can find her coding in Elm, Ruby, or Python. Previously a Lab Instructor at Hackbright Academy, Ally has also spent much of her life running safaris and treks in Southern Africa. In her free time, she cooks, plays video games, and camps in the Sierras. She lives in Oakland, California with her wife, dog, and leopard gecko.

Ally's talk: Naming Things in Elm

An average person can hold entire libraries worth of information in their head without even trying. Why is it then, that when I am working on an Elm app, I find myself flipping back and forth from tab to tab and scrolling through the hundreds of lines of code trying to find a few lines I've already read? While we may be able to hold vast amount of data in our brains, this does not apply to our "working memory". As programmers, we have to be picky about what we dive into within a codebase. This is why naming in Elm, though often taken for granted as styling choices, becomes an integral part of working memory preservation. Reducing the amount of names we have to parse, or making those names more expected, can lower the number of assumptions we have to make and the space we need in our memory to hold them. I hope to introduce some small stylistic changes as well as grander design approach suggestions, so that people can write their Elm apps with greater confidence and velocity.