Cognitive Psychology and the Zen of Code

Many of us are familiar with the old adage about writing code "for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute" (thanks, Abelson and Sussman) - but it's easier said than done. The fields of object-oriented design, patterns, and software architecture are vast, but primarily concerned with the mechanical structure of code - what if we took a step back from the nuts and bolts of the code and look at the way we as humans read and write it? Can we use our understanding of the psychology of human cognition to better understand our target audience, and in turn write code that is more intuitive, readable, and maintainable? This talk will walk through some of the basics of cognitive psychology and relate them back to concrete ways that we as developers can optimize our code for high performance in the interpreter between our ears.