Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman have done a couple great talks on probing the important social aspects of software development, especially in the open source arena. Open Source Projects and Poisonous People talks about how to survive “that guy” joining the community of your favorite project, be it open source or not. Their most recent jam, The Myth of the “Genius Programmer”, tries to temper the romanticism that developers can magically put forth reams of brilliant code. By proceeding with humility, one can appear as a genius without all the hubris and potential for downfall.
See also: my OSCON 2007 talk on PeopleHacks.
