Making Badass Developers - Kathy Sierra (Serious Pony) keynote

are there any unicorns here be proud okay more than one all right so imagine that you're at a party oh there it is imagine that you're at a party with a bunch of web developers and a few normal people and somebody says this and by the way these monitors down here aren't working so forgive me for looking at what's happening so somebody says that and then they say that and then they say this which you've all heard right how hard can it be so now imagine what you are thinking at this party and you've all heard this so then it goes okay well then what do you have to know and this is where it gets interesting because of course every single person at this event whether they're a web developer or not has an opinion about this so they all start talking and they all start giving their ideas about what you really have to know I mean you absolutely cannot call yourself a web developer if you don't have these things whatever it is but they're all starting to argue about it because they don't all agree and I'm not making fun of node by the way just a little bit um so there starts to be this argument among even this very small group of people so if we can't agree on what you have to know then we will ask the experts because who else is going to tell us and so this is what they say you absolutely cannot call yourself a developer if you don't at least know all of those things right now so you have to be a rockstar as every ad will tell you you have to be a ninja you have to be a hacker you have to be a hacker ninja and the Internet is wrong spoiler alert um so if you ask 10,000 people you get 10,000 different opinions on what you have to know to be a web developer at any given time so this should be comforting because it means there is no one answer at all but the people who say these things especially the people on Hacker News they know they are firm in their commitment but they don't actually know they just think they do so what do you have to know that is the wrong question so a better question is you know you are going to have to learn stuff so how fast can you do that how much and how fast can you do that and still survive well it starts here there are three kinds of developers or human there's of course the Unicorn and there's humanoid and the problem is humanoids have consistently available always up cognitive resources perfect memory etc etc humans their cognitive resources are so scarce and precious and limited I'm not gonna talk about unicorns because you don't exist so you've you've been mistaken for a humanoid everything every almost every 99.9% because someone's going to go not all open source documentation treats me like this everything treats you like a humanoid probably your boss your employer's your clients school everything you've ever done every book that's helped you learn to program including potentially mine have treated you like a humanoid and not a human so a little refresher on cognitive resources because that's the perspective that we're going to use because it is the only key you have to actually learning really quickly and really well so most of you are probably familiar with this but just a little refresher so this was one of the experiments that really started at all so imagine that I split the room and this half of the room I give you a little memory test and it only has two digits you just have to memorize two digits pretty easy this whole side of the room seven digits not seven numbers just seven digits pretty easy so I give you that test give you that test then you're all done and the researcher says can you come down the hall you know for further processing the experiment is over but of course it's never over and then they say oh by the way would you like a snack and you're offered fruit or cake so I think you probably all know what happens this side of the room you guys chose a lot more cake these are the really slim fruit eaters so the difference was just five extra digits that's how much it took so again at first they thought well it's just about the glucose in the brain which has something to do with that but really what they learned is that it's all one tank cognitive processing for solving problems for thinking doing the hard stuff and willpower all the same tank one pool of resources burn one you burn the other and it works with dogs too so for example this is actually my dog it they did these experiment with different breeds of dogs take a dog and have it sit just sit obediently just to sit doesn't do anything but sit take another dog and it has to go in the crate for 10 minutes at the end of 10 minutes they release the dogs to play one of those treat puzzles which they had cruelly rigged so it actually couldn't ever be solved by the dog and then they waited to see how long the dogs would work on that puzzle so the dogs that had to sit in the crate worked on that puzzle twice as long as the dogs that just had to sit obediently so think about that if you have a dog right your dog just sitting there is burning through self control cognitive resources and then can't think and we're sitting in the crate required no use of cognitive resources the dog was able to in self control the dog was able to use them all to solve the puzzle so think about this if you are doing anything in your own products or services or anything that you make for other people think am i doing things that are unnecessarily burning people's cognitive resources am i doing things that will make them choose cake and often we are and so this is a problem so the goal is to reduce cognitive leaks all the time and to always remember it is one tank and it is so scarce and so easily depleted so again here's how it works right even if you're doing something that you like to do you even if you're doing something it's not about doing something that you hates about actually just using your brain to think so but if this happens right then you have less ability to resist the drive-through on the way home and it works in Reverse you've all had a client or a boss say that you can just do that today right now what you're thinking is something like this but what you actually say is sure no problem now if you say sure no problem instead of what you really think you just burned a lot more cognitive resources which is why when you think about it it really makes no sense for people to hold all the kinds of meetings they hold because every meeting that you attend most of the time is bleeding your cognitive resources dry so when you go back and try to work right you can't function so you you tell the client sure no problem when you're thinking gosh if you could only die in a fire then you can't play chess that night this is how it works and there are a gazillion studies that support this it's all one tank but it's not just these big things right there's a death by a cognate a thousand cognitive micro leaks all the tiny little things those could be tiny little things in an interface just tiny little things that you have to deal with so here's an example anyone have an Apple TV remote right anyone here not lost it in the cushions so this thing is so tiny right so this is what people end up doing they do it so much that this is what I entered is the search string people taping their Apple remote to bigger things because that's what I had to do and there are so many who's even a Kickstarter right so it's not about the lost time looking for the remote it's the it's the tiny little cognitive resources all the time and so people try to find these solutions so that they don't have to waste cognitive resources on them but those things add up to a huge pool so think about all the little things they matter so what we know is that where there is high expertise there is a great deal of cognitive resource management for efficiency when learning and efficiency and effectiveness when actually doing the thing so that's what we're going to look at is how to get way better way faster from a cognitive resources perspective because without that nothing you do will matter so this is the framework we're going to look at right Majan you have three boards with post-it notes one is for the things that you can't do but will need to the next is for things that you can do with effort these are the things that are burning cognitive resources and then the last is for things that have moved into the automatic mastered possibly unconscious stage so the goal is to always be moving things across that board but there are a bunch of problems we're going to look real quick at these three main problems and how to solve them so the first one is you just don't get better when people don't make progress the main reason usually comes down to this pile up on B there's just too many things draining cognitive resources now you just saw that experiment with the 2 and the 7 how just five extra digits overwhelmed your cognitive resources it takes so little and here you are trying to learn so many things so the pile up on B is there are too many cognitive resources being drained to ever effectively nail something and get it over to the C pile so problem number two is the intermediate blues this is when someone is making progress and then they just plateau something happens and they just can't seem to get any better and the main reason for that is usually that something has made it to see but it's not high quality or it's not supporting them or maybe it's outdated and now it's holding them back and it once worked whatever it is but now it may even be unconscious and if not unconscious it's something that doesn't take any cognitive resources which was the point so nobody wants to pull it back and refine it so we'll look at that and problem number three is it just takes too long we don't have that kind of time not when you know Cora and read it and stack overflow and hacker news is telling us everything we need to learn so we have to fix those things so if to fix pile up on be half-assed on see these are actually relatively simple to fix especially pile up on B this would change your life if you really started doing it like today the too slow we're going to look at that because that's the one where all the magic happens so pile up on B we need to fix that because we have a bad balance too many things taking cognitive resources so you can't just ever finally nail something and get it off the cognitive resource plate so there are a couple things you can do there's the obvious one but this is not always easy to do especially when other people are driving what you're supposed to be learning is you just keep more stuff on a you don't try to learn it right you don't have to learn the whole API right now you can do it in pieces but the main thing we can do and this is what you know 50 years of research on expertise development has told us split these things into small subtasks sub skills and take those small sub skills to see and then suddenly you become a lot more effective and efficient that's how you move through getting better now how do you know what size of a sub skill actually is going to help make that process happen so and this is the thing to remember half a skill beats a half hour skill the way that you can tell this is one way you can tell there are many ways this is one way that is a really simple way is if you can take a skill from you can't do it to mastered like maybe 95% of the time that you try it you get it right within three sessions and each practice session it within one to three sessions and each session is no more than 45 to 90 minutes if you can't if you haven't done if you haven't nailed this thing you've just got it in that amount of time the thing is too big so you need a finer-grained skill so that you can just keep moving them along that's how progress happens but it's you can see it's not what we normally try to do so but here's a bigger problem that this helps fix the scariest thing about practicing with a bunch of stuff on be a bunch of stuff that you just keep working on it you keep working on it keep working on it you haven't really nailed it you know you're getting better but you're still crappy at it is that practice makes permanent so whatever you practice the longer you practice being crappy at it or being or even just being a beginner the better you get at staying a beginner or mediocre so it's really important to take fewer things and very quickly pass through that stage and jump up to intermediate as quickly as you can now half a skills on see this one the biggest problem is that we don't ever want to revisit those things and when they study very high expertise they find people who are continually rechecking the things they've already automated and mastered to see does this need to be refined does this still serve me just that it you know is this causing me to now hit a limit and I can't go any further so consider what those things are but think about what's on your sea board right now and these can be big things little things things you do things you know right I'm just going to admit this I've never admitted this before but I've been programming almost 30 years and I just started using an IDE two weeks ago I have been well I considered sublime that was my big upgrade to an IDE I've been using TextEdit in the command line so I finally IntelliJ yes and after about two days I'm like I'm killing myself of how many cognitive resources I will never recover not doing this but it was just easier right I just did what I did so programming paradigm right now we're in the ofp thing coding style semicolons typing whatever it might be how you hold a stylus for your graphic designer all of those things could be anything but think about bringing it back now that takes cognitive resources to do it but this is the most effective use of your cognitive resources if you want to keep getting better so but if it's too slow how does this help you you can be doing everything right moving things across the board but it's too slow and for you folks it probably doesn't get more challenging for how fast you have to learn new things than for you the people in this room so like I'm telling you something you don't know so we need to bypass be where we can because if you can go straight from can't do it too suddenly you just magically can how awesome is that and we can and we also want to speed up a to B to C so it all starts here this is the most extreme example which I'm sure most of you are familiar with but just for a refresher the most extreme example of something that bypasses C where you go from I can't do it to I'm an absolute expert and I have no idea I got there so chicken sexing determining the gender of a baby chick apparently there are certain kinds of chickens where that it's virtually impossible to perceive it now obviously it's not impossible for the brain but it's impossible for the people who are actually trying to figure it out but people become really really good at it so in Japan they took a group of people and said these are the master chick sexers we will have them teach other chicks Xers and so they tried and they couldn't because either they didn't know what rules they were actually using or how they were actually doing it or they were just guessing so they couldn't teach people so instead they did something else and this is where it all happens this is the this is the template even though this is very simplified it scales up to things much more complex they took the people who are going to learn to be chicks Xers and they just here's the bin of chicks and it would just pick up a chick and say I don't know female and the chick sex our expert would say yes no yes no and the person was just doing it randomly just sorting them I have no idea yeah male-female over time their responses were not random they got better and better and better better and given enough time became experts without ever knowing how they suddenly got better so again that's the most extreme example another one was the world war two civilian plane spotters in England there were people who got to be really good at a crucial skill which is knowing is that incoming plane a bomber or is that one of our own so again they tried to have those expert plane spotters teach others couldn't do it they didn't actually know what rules they were using or every time they said they had a set of rules something about that there would be you know exceptions to those rules that made it all fall apart so they did the same thing with the chicks Xers they just had the person who wanted to learn next to the expert and they created new expert plane spotters that way brains do things all the best things the brain does have nothing to do with us we don't get to have a say and this is what drives us crazy about people who really do have a lot of expertise when you say things like well how did you know how did you do that how did you figure that out right they just they don't know they just know and all of you have things that you have deep expertise at where this is true for you the problem is we often think we know even when we don't so those were simple tasks right the chicken sexing and the plains bunny well extremely difficult but very simple in terms of identification what about more elaborate things because we're talking about development so here's an experiment that was done with NASA and some people from UCLA pretty spectacular that's it's kind of shocking how few people have actually really looked at this they took these are the any pilots in here so this is the six-pack the instrument the flight instruments they took non-pilots not beginning pilots people who have never actually even thought about flying a plane and they put them through this training program lasted about two hours very special training program very much like the chick sexing right this is what happened they outscored the seasoned pilots with a thousand to two thousand hours of flight time non pilots on app receipt and speed of knowing what those instruments meant in terms of the plane so that's really dramatic they didn't even have any teaching at all they went straight from A to C and then they did it again with an aviation a navigation task same thing this is order of magnitude right now could they could they leave in fly plane no but they had just learned two really crucial skills that no longer have to drain cognitive resources and oh yes they're really awesome at it because it's a really life-saving skill too so they just jumped way up the curve so you can't learn everything that way but you can learn so many more things than people believe so it's not use this is actually called perceptual learning so that's the reason it's not used is because for so long really the sixth easel is when a lot of this 1960's a lot of this research started and it's robust is they believed that it was just about sensory perception they just thought it was about what the eyes saw or heard that or even kinesthetic they didn't realize that the brain was pattern-matching also on deep underlying structures and patterns and rules that it wasn't just about sensory perception so why we're not using this is um crazy so brains are great at pattern matching if we get out of the way but they don't tell us that they're doing it which is why you have these experts who have absolutely no idea how they do certain things and you know you you may have encountered someone or you may yourself look at some code for just a second without really studying it and go that code smells bad right we use words like that smells bad you may not yet know why but you are certain it does so that's an example of your brain has pattern matched in a way that you aren't even cognitively aware of yet although you could dig into the code and find out why now this is the answer to how to make it happen is high quality high quantity examples and this is what we don't do it has to be very high quantity of all high quality examples and we don't do that we see one example we see two examples we see three examples in a book or a course on a website right to actually get that order of magnitude jump it takes about 200 to 300 exposures in a very compressed period of time that allows the brain to sort signal from noise so that's where the magic happens and we can do this as a community and I've been trying to look and it is really hard to find really good quality examples in such high numbers but they can be very small right teaching a very small subset I shouldn't say teaching letting the brain figure out the pattern but to sort signal from noise the example set has to be huge otherwise the brain we see this the brain looks at one example and thinks well maybe that's important too and it mistakes surface details for the core underlying pattern so the answer is we have to care about each other's cognitive resources so right now I just want you to look around at the people next to you right now I'm going to sit here until you do can't leave till you look around to people next to you and realize that they are not humanoids they are not unicorns they're humans and just visualize them bleeding cognitive resources and think about how you can help them and they can help you and being at this event is really a great way to do that and the next time somebody says this to you right the only reasonable response is that's adorable and I just want to honor that you are all humans and your cognitive resources are scarce and precious and thank you so much for spending some of them on me thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: O'Reilly

Views: 342,505

Rating: 4.899487 out of 5

Keywords: O'Reilly Media (Publisher), O'Reilly, OReilly, OReilly Media, Kathy Sierra (Author), fluent conference, fluent 2015, serious pony, Web Developer (Job Title), badass developers, making badass developers, training developers

Id: FKTxC9pl-WM

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/cygnosis]

That's a really interesting idea for how to quickly move from beginner to expert in any intellectual skill. The obvious follow up question is how can we use the suggested technique?

Say I wanted to learn CSS. Or to try to break it down into a bite sized chunk, CSS positioning. Where can I find 100 high quality examples? Okay, I think the answer just popped into my head. CSS Zen Garden.

Well, what about JavaScript? Let's say you've read a few books and know something about it, but you aren't sure you are using the right techniques the right way? Where can I find a large number of very high quality commented/documented examples of how to write JavaScript that I can study? There is a Javascript Zen Garden but it seems to be more documentation than examples.

Or what about HTML 5? Where can I find lots of high quality examples of how to use the various aspects of HTML 5?

And if I'm making these lists myself how do I know which examples are high quality and which aren't?

Edit: Not sure this is an answer, but it's all I've found so far.

• Where can one find examples of good quality open source coding?

[u/[deleted]]

For anyone more interested in optimizing his learning process, there's a book called Make it Stick: The science of successful learning that dissolves common myths around learning.

[u/deralte]

uhm, unicorns?

[u/DangerRangerous]

Feel free to skip the first 10 minutes.