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Martha Kelly Schumann: “Kindness Doesn’t Scale (or, lies an Engineer told me)”

Martha Kelly Schumann began her career as an artist and holds a BFA in Graphic Design in Alabama where she grew up. During the summer of 2012 she pursued her interest in computers by attending a 3-month program at the Hacker School in NY where she fell in love with programming. She is now a software engineer at Uber and the founder of LadiesHackDay—a meetup for women of all skills and ages to build radical things together.

Photo by: Amber Gregory

The subject of her talk however stemmed from a conversation she once had with a fellow [arrogant] engineer about her side project “love bomb” which aimed to aggregate random acts of kindness to offer solace to those harassed online. Exploring the idea of making this system of kindness scale, she led the audience through a journey into networked systems (both human and computer), thought experiments and theories.

Martha Kelly Schumann

Martha Kelly Schumann is a self-taught Software Engineer who writes rad software at Uber. She began her career as an artist and has her BFA in Art/Design from Auburn University. During the summer of 2012 a twist of fate brought Martha to Hacker School in NYC where she fell head-over-heels in love with programming. As a result Martha founded LadiesHackDay and is focused on lowering the barrier to entry for other women in programming. She is also quite fond of whiskey, cats, macarons, peonies, and Twitter.

Speaker page

Martha’s presentation concluded with these inspiring thoughts:

Altruistic characteristics are key to our evolution – we need kindness to survive!
Watch the video
Martha Kelly SchumannKindness Doesn’t Scale (or, lies an Engineer told me)
Think about the kind of change you want to make, and don’t underestimate the scale of your impact. Starting with your smaller circle of friends and family still benefits the greater humanity.
With the power of the Internet we’re not bound by our locality, we can affect change anywhere in the world. Kindness might not scale, but the Internet does. So, use the Internet for good.