I've been working in Tech for a couple years now as an engineer, but previously as a product manager.

But, like a lot of people, in my degree isn't in computer science.

It's an anthropology, which is the study of human societies and evolution.

And I really like thinking about systems of people.

And now I also really like thinking about systems and programs.

Um, and I think that I really enjoy that.

A lot of the talks today have are about, like, user empathy and bringing that into our technical process.

And I think understanding people is the key to building a successful products and also to architect ing them the right way.

Eso this talk is about the web norms of the world, and it's It's based on the premise that websites and technology are different around the world.

If you've traveled to another continent on vacation, you may have experienced this.

When you try to buy something, look up, then go to a museum or get train tickets on.

If you're a multinational person, this is definitely no surprise to you.

I'm so I just wanted to hop in and give it a couple examples of how websites might look and feel different in different places.

So this is Rocket 10 which is the top Japanese e commerce site.

Um, it's it's obviously a website, but there are some differences versus Japanese.

Um, there's a lot of navigation options at the top.

There aren't many large drop down menus on.

There's a lot of icons.

Pair of these navigation items and the product images all have a text baked into them.

And if we compare that to a site like Amazon in the U.

S, there are fewer navigation elements.

The product categories are hidden under one big hamburger menu.

There's no text in the product images.

The Texas generally larger, more spread out.

Um, another example.

Train travel is really popular in Europe.

It's super normal to jump on a train to go for a quick vacation.

This is Frances trained portal.

They offer hotel deals, and I've noticed that European transit sites have adopted this like really friendly candy color bubble style in their Web design.

And I think it reflects the like, fun, popular consumer nature of train travel.

So let's compare it to Amtrak in the US It's definitely more serious in style.

There's less focus on destinations.

There are no destinations on their home page.

I think maybe it's a little more consumer.

Sorry, commuter focused.

So I started to wonder why these websites were different.

And I keep coming back to my educational background studying culture.

I always thought that they were clear right and wrong ways to make a website.

But when you put it within an anthropological lens, there isn't right.

It's it's all within the context of each culture.

Um, and I think the question is analogous with asking, Why are people around the world different?

It's, uh, which scientists have been trying to answer for hundreds of years, so I will try to do it in 30 minutes.

I've been told to drink water, so I think that the answer is that technology is a mode of cultural expression, just like language or dancing music.

Food architecture includes people's customs or lifestyles, how they orient themselves to the world.

I think even our technical decisions, the ones we make every day from the programming languages, the frameworks Uh huh, Deb service is to the design and colors.

We choose our all driven by a combination of social factors that are unique to each other's cultures.

So why is this important to talk about?

Why can't people just figure it out for themselves, Right?

Like I'm familiar with the U.

S.

Is culture.

I can build websites and products for people in the U.

S.

There's a bunch of reasons.

The first is that computer and Internet technology is totally not really globalised.

It's globalized, better and faster than any other technology.

And we all rely on the same foundational elements for building software like operating systems, programming languages, open source projects, you'll find react developers in every corner of the world, and global software corporations have already become really huge and multinational.

Just look at Google and Facebook.

Ins on Web service is people across the world use iPhones, Developed Apple in California.

Many people I've android phones that are built in China and Japan and Korea.

Um, and the world is coming more in line.

The digital.

The digital divide refers to the gap between people who have access to the Internet and those who don't is shrinking.

So in 1990 the Internet was not very popular, but over the last couple of decades, it's grown tremendously.

Now there are 3.5 1,000,000,000 people with Internet access, and that's only that's actually slightly under half of the world's population.

Some researchers claim total Internet adoption between 2030 and 2040 and emerging economies are adopting the Internet at exponential rates.

Like India, I'm even countries like Bangladesh and Ghana, which are small compared India.

Justin population have doubled the number of Internet connected users in the past couple of years, and this is bringing the user is an opportunity to these countries to the Internet.

Credit, more demand for developers and service is locally and globally.

It is developers.

We benefit from having more developers and being connected with each other around the world.

We can share code, can learn from each other.

We go to each other's conferences.

Innovations that are made in one part of the world can make a big difference in another part of the world.

And I think that well localized software that really meets the needs of people in each of these areas will ultimately win.

So products that don't make meat user's needs like having offline support choosing but making a smart choice between building a desktop or mobile.

We're not translating will, uh, will cause the proctor not connect with local users on because the because Internet companies are uniquely able to target new customers in global markets.

I think all of us, as developers will need to learn how to internationalize properly.

I mean, think about different cultures around the world, and this includes things like open source software, which already totally globally shared.

I am really like this example.

This is the Twitter chronological timeline example.

Really switch the feed from time ordered to algorithmic.

I think it shows that culture extends to how people want to use technology and how much trust they have in it.

Onda fact that they backtracked, I think, shows that ultimately software will have to bend to human culture and needs no s.

So how can we make more culturally sensitive technology?

I think we can start by understanding, like the different factors that developers can consider when building software.

The 1st 1 is language, so languages the core thing we do every day.

It's how we talk to each other.

It includes coding.

Language affects how we design websites.

It affects whether you can read the technical docks for a new language or framework, you want to try the second our cultural attitudes, which are How much do people trust the Internet?

Are they willing to put their credit cards in to buy something online?

Are they open just trying new things?

Do they have established customs already?

How much do they care about?

Like lots of rules and order, what other lifestyles like and how they integrated the Internet and technology into it?

The next one is government policy, so some countries restrict the Internet, others in force, regulations to preserve privacy and other countries don't protect their Internet freedoms.

And us in the final one is in a infrastructure.

So who is on the Internet in the first place?

Is the connectivity widespread is available everywhere?

Is it stable?

Or is the intermittent S O.

I want to go through each one of these, provide lots of examples and talk about how developers around the world.

I'm handle these different factors.

So the first is that language effects how user interface is designed, built.

There are a lot of languages.

There are over 7000 known languages.

This is one of my favorite maps.

Each one of these languages has their own writing systems.

One example is hung Goal, which is the primary Korean rating system on dhe.

When you take all the handle characters and put it into a unicorn block, you gonna block.

That's about 11,000 cliffs large.

There's a lot of them, Um, and there's challenges to using font things is with thousands of characters.

It makes it really expensive to design them, which makes it expensive to license them.

This means that historically, there have been limited selection of wth e fought faces that our Web safe in common across devices.

And moreover, the files containing these funny faces are really huge.

They can reach like 15 megabytes and size, compared to just like a Latin alphabet alphabet font face, which could be like 400 or 500 kilobytes.

I mean, that could be a huge deal breaker, especially if you're trying to load these on mobile.

So these limitations require clever workarounds when very common workarounds to display text and images.

This is a thistle Korean e commerce site, G market.

In all the text on this website in the navigation are images, and there are huge benefits to this.

It loads faster.

You could ensure the quality, the text rendering.

It's gonna look the same across browsers.

One method Thio natively, render fonts is called sub setting This conspiracy it up eso subsets or just like slices of a thought file down to just the characters you need to load to show the characters on page.

There are some really cool solutions out there.

A group of Korean designers and developers at a Korean fonts to the Google Fonts Project that uses machine learning driven sub setting to group commonly seen characters together to reduce load times on dhe when it served over the Google funds, a P I have benefits from cross site cashing so user would only need to load the thought once in order to see it across many websites.

Okay, so there's there's other languages, like Arabic and Hebrew there, read from right to left, and these require flipped layouts that are called bi directional.

So anything that naturally goes on the left in English like on the Tel Aviv Museum of Art website um, when it's translated into Hebrew, would be totally mirror Andi.

Everything has to be mirrored down to the navigation.

There were some CSS framework that could be used to achieve this, like right to left CSS.

This will automatically flip any directional CSS property, so, like border left or margin right would be automatically flipped.

But you can also specify, like manual processors, to do this.

The next is that text text also takes up a different amount of space when you translate it.

And I think that this could contribute to some interpretations of like non English language websites is maybe cluttered or busy.

I see that on the Web, but really, I think it's a difference in writing system and a lack of familiarity.

So the word views is actually three times longer and Italian than it is in English.

And just in my own informal test, uh, this Thai translation of programming is very fun, and cool is 1.7 times the space.

So if you're gonna localize your project, it has to go further than translating strings.

You can't translate your translate your English site to Arabic without building a bi directional layout.

I mean, you have to account for the expansion and contraction of text when you translate it as well, so we're building interfaces to support different languages, but we know there are over 7000 of them and the application programming We d'oh like writing weather maps in languages like Java script.

All use abstractions in English terminology.

So all the reserved words and JavaScript or English, And this is even the case for languages like Ruby, which was invented in Japan.

And it was five years between Ruby's invention and the first English language book that was published, Um, but if we look at the top spoken languages in the world, we can see how much of a disconnect there is right, like English is no more commonly spoken than Hindi or really Arabic and much less so than Chinese Click.

So what's happened is that English has become a lingua franca or a common or trade language for computing.

It's kind of similar to Latin in the Roman Empire who conquered the their way around is Fred Latin everywhere, Um, or Italian and music theory.

I'm in adopting common languages.

Both spoken languages and programming languages does have a lot of benefits.

It makes it easier to share code and communicate.

I don't have to translate your piece of code into my language in order to run it or understand it, and it makes it easier for work to be cumulative.

As developers around the world, we can grow the entire pie, um, software, rather than developing technology in parallel specific to each language group.

So given the prevalence of English and programming and also an international trade and diplomacy goes that English is the most studied language in the world, even though it's not the most spoken language.

Also, I think we can also admit that code is not really English.

I don't know what a craft means, but I do know what it does.

Um, I have been writing 1/2 since I was, like 12 and I don't still don't know what it is, Um, so these terms might be derived from English, but you can code without learning to speak it.

Although you do have to become familiar with the Latin alphabet, I think I would describe code as a new dialect of English.

In many ways, some programming tools skip English based code altogether, though this is scratch with which is a block based programming tool developed at M I t.

It's used by kids in schools and museums around the world, about half of the scratch users or out of the U.

S.

And Europe.

The block abstraction makes it really easy to translate each of these logical blocks into a different language.

And research done by M.

I.

T.

Has shown that kids do learn how to code faster when they used their native language.

And also just because reserved words in, uh in the programming language languages we use are in English doesn't mean they can't be replaced.

So this is a project called your Lang, which is a node like language in Yorba, which is a language spoken in Nigeria.

And projects like these, I think, could help non English speakers get into programming in the beginning.

But I would also love to see a future where we're able to inter translate languages like the's like I don't see why we couldn't translate thes reserved words back in English or in any other language and run it.