This talk is part of a series focused on Learning.
The two basic ideas behind the Learning Series are:
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As knowledge workers, Learning is fundamental to both our day-to-day happiness and our long-term happiness with our career.
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The better we get at Learning the happier we will become.
The core idea behind this talk, Learning ..with tools is:
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We all use tools everyday to get our work done.
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If we share our approach, our method, our strategies, all of which revolve around the concrete tools we use, we can only become happier.
Maybe you know something someone else doesn't? Maybe they know something you don't? Let's share.
With that said, this talk is mostly done!
The remainder of this talk includes specific examples of "tools" that work for me. These are the things I'd start sharing if we sat down and started talking.
You might find this interesting if work on the same sorts of things that I do. But, you might not work on the same things that I do, and so more likely than not you'll find this boring. Knowing this, I've set the talk up to start with more widely applicable ideas and then home in on stuff that's interesting to programmers later on.
So.. here we go. This is going to be intentionally wide-ranging and quick.
If you remember only one thing:
Your happiness stems from what you create. Share your tools, thoughts, and approach to your art.
Let's talk about the tools that I'm using to give this talk about learning with tools.
What's up on the screen right now? This presentation is delivered via a framework called "reveal.js" It's an HTML page, so it can be served up anywhere you can get a connection. It runs on an iPad or iPhone.
There's an online demo that contains a survey of the functionality it offers. You can create these things by modifying HTML or using a WYSIWYG experience.
Why do I use this? I like reveal.js because I can create slides in my favorite editor, I can post them online, and I've got decent browser support (iPad).
Until a few months ago, I had never used a window manager on MacOS, but I had always been envious of people that had them. I started using Slate, and I won't go back.
During this presentation, you may notice me doing the following things to the active window with Slate:
- Making it be 1/4 of the screen size and placing it in a corner.
- Making it be 1/2 of the screen size, and placing it on one of the halves.
- Making it be the entire size of the screen (full screen)
- Making the currently activated screen go to my second monitor.
If you want to get started with slate, you can check out the homepage. If you want to get up and running quickly with my setup, you can check out some notes that I wrote up.
Why do I use this? I don't like taking my fingers off the keyboard. It's easier and faster to make things go where I want.
Apple > System Preferences > Trackpad > Two Fingers > Screen Zoom
Zoom in any part of your screen without changing anything. Helps me present. Helps me read: use slate to make something take up a quarter of the screen, zoom in on it.
Why do I use this? If you're ever presenting to a room full of people, you will sooner or later find yourself in a situation where you'd wish that you could make the font larger. Most well-behaved applications let you do this, but many of them "re-layout" the screen once you've increased it and this can be less than optimal. Also, I wear eyeglasses but sometimes forget them. Finally, there was once a time when I did design work and every last pixel counted.
Okay, that's the general introduction to what you see on the screen. If you've got any questions afterward or want to get started with any of these things, give me a yell and we'll figure it out.
In knowledge work, and life, your brain is too important to be overlooked.
Recently we saw a video named The Awareness Test.
In the video, you are asked to count passes made by members of a basketball team. There are two teams: one in white jerseys and one in black jerseys. About half way through the passing a bear walks in between the players, does a dance, and leaves.
However, almost 1/2 of the people who watch this video don't see the bear at all. When quizzed about it afterward, the people who miss the bear are sure that it wasn't there.
It turns out if you watch that video without the instruction to count the number of passes, you see the gorilla 100% of the time.
What lessons can be learned here? When you brain is busy you can become blind to the obvious. And, you can be blind to your blindness.
If your brain is prone to blindness, or making mistakes, or being tricked, you're better off knowing when this is likely to happen so you can be aware of it.
You can learn more about this experiment in the book The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. You can also read about it briefly in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow on page 24.
For people who didn't see the bear, let's consider another question:
A ball and a bat cost $1.10.
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
This question is designed so that an answer quickly pops into your mind. That answer is 10 cents, and it is incorrect.
If you write this question down on a piece of paper and ask it of college students, 80% of them will get it wrong.
What do you think happens if you make the paper hard to read, with a washed out font?
The failure rate drops dramatically, in the neighborhood of 80% -> 30%.
Here's another lesson to be learned: there may be a part of your brain that's looking for the quick, easy answer. Yet there are conditions in which you don't look for the easy answer. It's worth looking into this to figure out what's going on.
You are constantly monitoring your environment. Sometimes this is explicit, sometimes it's implicit. What you pick up from your environment can impact what you think.
If someone shows you the word 'Hungry?' and asks you to fill in a blank like so: SO_P you're more likely to come up with SOUP instead of SOAP. Alternatively, if someone shows you the word 'Dirty?' and asks you to fill in the same blank, this time you're more likely to come up with SOAP.
That's an example of explicit priming. And it isn't too surprising.
But, it turns out that you pick up on unsaid clues as well. There are experiments that show you can reliably reproduce the following:
- Get a bunch of people 18-22 years old
- Ask them to work on puzzles.
- As they resolve the puzzles, several of the puzzles have solutions with words such as:
- Florida
- Bald
- Wrinkle
- All of these words are hinting at the general idea of a person that is older.
- Then, ask the test subjects to move from one room to another. From their point of view the test is over.
- But, this is what you're really testing!
- They move significantly SLOWER between the two rooms.
- After things are really over, the test subjects, when questioned, deny having any idea of 'being older' in their heads-- they can't single out any of the answers to the tests as more important than the others.
What!
And further, just by hearing this, you've gone through the same "slow down." In your case it was explicit, but the idea is that you can be picking up on things that are altering your behavior without knowing that you're picking up on anything or changing your behavior!
Daniel Kahneman in his book says:
Much of what we know now would have sounded like science fiction thirty or forty years ago.
This is going to close the section on brain stuff, but the take away is as follows: if this is true, which I believe it is, learning more about what's happening can only benefit you. Who knows what you're taking in? Who knows what bad judgments you're making?
There's a bunch involved with the Pomodoro technique, but my real take away is that how you choose to work can impact you after you leave work. I liken it to physical exercise: if you had to run 26 miles in the span of a week, every week, for a year, there are different ways you could approach it that would lead to very different outcomes.
You could run a marathon every Monday, and then take the next 6 days off, and repeat for 51 more weeks.
Or, you could run a mile, rest for an hour, and then repeat four times a day.
Which would you rather do?
The same holds for you brain: if you cram it full of stuff and make it handle distractions (like email, or meetings, or people dropping by) and then cram it full again and keep it crammed for hours on end, my observation is that you'll work less efficiently, accomplish less overall, and be more tired at the end of the day. On days when there's a bunch going on, it'll take longer to unwind and you might even have harder trouble getting to, and staying, asleep.
You can read more about the pomodoro technique online or in this book
It's often the case that the approach you take toward people, a situation, or learning in general can be crucial. Here are three important ideas I bring with me throughout the day.
Take a look at this image from the wikipedia article on Maxima and Minima:
If you're looking for the maximum value of a function in a region, it's possible you may find a local maxima, but not the global maxima. Functions exist to find maxima, but they can sometimes get "stuck in a local maxima."
How do you know that you're not stuck in a local maxima?
When I started googling around for this, I saw that someone famous has already spoken about it. Seth Godin's write-up is exactly what I'm talking about.
What are the chances that two people in this room share the same birthday?
From the wikipedia on the Birthday Problem:
In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99% probability is reached with just 57 people, and 50% probability with 23 people.
We've got more than 57 people in this room, so almost certainly we've got two people with the same birthday. That's likely a paradox because when you think birthday and likelihood of matching somehow 1 in 365 appears in your head.
Okay, stepping back for a bit, what's the chance that someone is having a really bad day?
- Maybe they're in pain.
- Maybe they're sick.
- Maybe they are caring for a sick child.
- Maybe they are caring for a sick parent.
- Maybe it's a serious sickness.
- Maybe they are young, and lonely.
- Maybe they are old, and lonely.
The list goes on..
What are the chances for anyone one of those things to be happening to someone? Much more likely than 1 in 365.
So, when I go out and about, I hope everyone's doing great, but I try to treat everyone as if they might be having a really bad day.
The book 'Pragmatic Learning and Thinking' has a lot to say about how the brain works. Earlier on, on page 15, in the introduction, they speak of the student/teacher relationship:
You don't get taught; you have to learn. We tend to look at the teacher/learner relationship the wrong way around: it's not that the teacher teaches; it's that the student learns. The learning is always up to you. It is the student's job to learn.
When you're serious about learning, you get wily about resources: you'll search them out. People? Sure. Videos? It's the internet! Books? Why not?
Here are some that I've found helpful:
- https://peepcode.com/products/rspec-i
- https://peepcode.com/products/advanced-git
- https://peepcode.com/products/play-by-play-tenderlove-ruby-on-rails
- http://confreaks.com/videos/1233-aloharuby2012-refactoring-from-good-to-great
- http://confreaks.com/videos/240-goruco2009-solid-object-oriented-design
- http://vimeo.com/26330100
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