This year’s conference theme is low/no-code programming, which is closely related to the family of end-user programming research. In this talk, I’ll share some outside-the-box perspectives, gleaned from decades of end-user programming work, on how end users’ programming environments can support their diverse users’ diverse programming activities. I’ll consider the intellectually freeing feeling of moving outside the “mechanisms” box to policies; the enhancement to viability of moving outside the “create” box to the whole software lifecycle; the differences revealed when moving outside the “typical user” box to diverse humans; and the plethora of possibilities arising from moving outside the “buggy code” box to a wide range of bug types.

Margaret Burnett’s research runs the gamut of human-centric aspects of developing software better. Together with her students and collaborators, she co-founded the area of end-user software engineering for both traditional software and for AI; brought information foraging theory to software tools that support today’s developers; and debunked the belief that software is gender-neutral and invented methods to eradicate software’s gender-inclusivity “bugs”. Her work has impacted commercial software used by millions of people.

Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She holds 4 patents; has received 10 best paper awards/honorable mentions and 5 Long-Term Impact awards; and has received multiple mentoring, service, and research awards. In 2022, she received IEEE’s TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering Award, for outstanding and sustained contributions to the software engineering community. She is an ACM Fellow, and was elected to ACM’s CHI Academy in 2016 as one of the “principal leaders of the field” of HCI.

Burnett believes she has attended more VL/HCC conferences than anyone else in the history of the conference. VL/HCC’23 will be the 34th VL/HCC (in a row) that she has attended.