by Isa Silveira de Souza (@silveira_bells)
As a community, we love to talk about tooling, but not about real problems. We need to take accountability for our code. We are responsible when we ship dark patterns and exploitative features — but we can use our position of power to change that.
Software can be used as a tool to reduce human suffering. When analyzing your time and effort, think about these things:
- Who is this helping?
- What does this software bring to the table of humanity?
We can use this framework for moving towards value driven development:
I'm not working for my employer, I'm working for my user. Data points are people
Stay away from companies employing dark UX patterns. Do your research and ask the hard questions during the interview, for example, how do you practice inclusivity?
List of examples:
- Too Good To Go — Connecting restaurants with expiring food to hungry families
- Be My Eyes — Empowering visually impaired people through video calls
- Red Cross — Community-based surveillance for alerting of possible outbreaks
- distribue|AID — A Europe-wide network that connects reguee aid groups, allowing costs to be lowered for aid shipments.
It takes a value driven community to build valuable tech. The future of JavaScript is driven by its community, so let's get our values right first.