2010
Notes from Rich Hickey’s Keynote at ClojureConj
I greatly appreciate being around inspiring people. This weekend I was fortunate enough to be around many inspiring people at ClojureConj, the kind of people who question their reality, not just their programming tools.
When was the last time you spent an entire hour thinking about a problem?
- a day
- a month
Practice to be good at something.
Problem Solving
1. What is the problem?
- out loud
- written
2. Understand the problem
- what do you know?
- what don’t you know?
- are there related problems?
3. Be discerning
- problems in your own solution?
- what tradeoffs?
- read in and around your space
- explore multiple options to say what tradeoffs were
Focus - “On the hammock, no one knows you’re not sleeping.”
Use waking mind time to feed work to background mind.
Loading
- Mind can juggle 7+/-2 things.
- When more, write it down.
- Go over in different order. Load in different combinations.
- Have no-input receptive time.
Wait
- at least overnight, sober
- sometimes months
- work on more than one thing
- not interleaved within a day, but over the course of time
- switch when stuck
Try it
- Get feedback
- Evidence may show that assumptions were wrong
You will be wrong
- You will think of better ideas
- Input facts change
- You’ll make mistakes
- It’s okay
When you read something, and you know that’s bogus, that’s positive!
“The beautiful thing about ideas is that they don’t have feelings.”
- If you have implemented a bad idea, you start to not like it.
- Detachment is natural.
- Why would you want to keep around a bad idea?
- Get rid of it. It’s not a child. It doesn’t have feelings.
Update 2010-10-27: Stumbled on Rich Hickey’s Clojure Bookshelf full of books about advanced programming topics, plus a hammock.
