Software Is Not Soft

"Users don't want to change their software. They want it to work."

I hear this a lot, and it's a strange thing to believe about a medium whose whole promise was that it could be changed.

Software today is not soft. Most of it can't be altered by the people using it, and we've built a set of habits around accepting that: feature requests, copy-paste workarounds, and an ever-growing assortment of folk practices.

It didn't have to go this way, and it doesn't have to stay this way. This talk will explore what else is possible, and how we might get there.