Today I am part of the “Leaders of Tomorrow Symposium” at SANER 2016. I got to present my past and future work (I’ll add a link to the talk here later, it will be on YT) but I was also asked to give some tips to aspiring future leaders, by answering the question:

So here is my advice, timely themed with the US elections in mind:

You have to be Bernie in the streets, but Hillary in the proceed(ing)s

Bernie in the streets

Well, in the streets, aka at invited talks, dinner, in panels etc, you can cry revolution. By all means way go all “free education” there.

Hillary in the proceed’s

But when you write a paper, believe it or not, you will have make sure you fit in with the community. If they hate your pant suit, drop the pant suit. If you have to wait decades for people to take you seriously, wait*. I know this might sound ridiculous coming from a person know to refuse conforming, but this is just how you get stuff done.

When writing a paper, I often think about Hillary’s amazing pitch for women’s rights:

So undeniably true and so smart. We all feel that everyone should human rights, no one debates that. Now, she equalizes them to what she wants to emphasis: women’s right.

I don’t want to compare myself to HRC, but this is a little bit how I pitched my spreadsheet smells work. Look at code smells, you know and love them, right? Okay, now we change the smallest thing, we swap code for spreadsheets. Make sure that the rest of your paper looks and feels like other papers, cite the people that matter even if you disagree with them. They should never see the revolution coming before it is too late 🙂

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* Despite having a dozen published papers on the topic, including 4 ICSE papers of which 1 was awarded best paper, in 2015 I still got this in a review: “Even if one of the authors got accepted a number of papers (also on very good venues) on the spreadsheet subject, I believe that spreadsheets are neither source code nor software artifacts.”