Where We’re Going

Every good journey begins with a map, and ours appears in the front portion of this book. Despite the linear flow of a book, these topics are entwined and interrelated, as the map shows.

After all, everything is connected to everything else. But it’s somewhat difficult to appreciate that idea with a linear read of a book. You can’t always get a sense of what’s related when faced with countless “see also” references in the text. By presenting the map graphically, I hope you get the opportunity to see what’s related to what a little more clearly.

With that in mind, the following is roughly where we are headed, despite a few side trips, tangents, and excursions on the way.

Journey from Novice to Expert

In the first part of the book, we’ll look at why your brain works as it does, beginning with a popular model of expertise.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition provides a powerful way of looking at how you move beyond beginner-level performance and begin the journey to mastery of a skill. We’ll take a look at the Dreyfus model and in particular look at the keys to becoming an expert: harnessing and applying your own experience, understanding context, and harnessing intuition.

This Is Your Brain

The most important tool in software development is, of course, your own brain. We’ll take a look at some of the basics of cognitive science and neuroscience as they relate to our interests as software developers, including a model of the brain that looks a lot like a dual-CPU, shared-bus design and how to do your own brain surgery of a sort.

Get in Your Right Mind

Once we have a better understanding of the brain, we will find ways to exploit underutilized facets of thinking to help encourage better creativity and problem solving, as well as harvest and process experiences more effectively.

We’ll also take a look at where intuition comes from. Intuition, the hallmark of the expert, turns out to be a tricky beast. You need it, you rely on it, but you also probably fight against using it constantly, without knowing why. You may also be actively suspicious of your own and others’ intuition, mistakenly thinking that it’s “not scientific.”

We’ll see how to fix that and give your intuition freer reign.

Debug Your Mind

Intuition is a fantastic skill, except when it’s wrong. There are a large number of “known bugs” in human thinking. You have built-in biases in your cognition, influences from when you’re born and from your cohort (those born about the same time as you), your innate personality, and even hardware wiring problems.

These bugs in the system often mislead you by clouding your judgment and steering you toward bad, even disastrous, decisions.

Knowing these common bugs is the first step to mitigating them.

Learn Deliberately

Now that we’ve gotten a good look at how the brain works, we’ll start taking a more deliberate look at how to take advantage of the system, beginning with learning.

Note that I mean learning in the broadest sense, covering not only new technologies, programming languages, and the like, but also your learning of the dynamics of the team you’re on, the characteristics of the evolving software you’re building, and so on. In these times, we have to learn all the time.

But most of us have never been taught how, so we sort of wing it as best we can. I’ll show you some specific techniques to help improve your learning ability. We’ll look at planning techniques, mind maps, a reading technique known as SQ3R, and the cognitive importance of teaching and writing. Armed with these techniques, you can absorb new information faster and easier, gain more insights, and retain this new knowledge better.

Gain Experience

Gaining experience is key to your learning and growth—we learn best by doing. However, just “doing” alone is no guarantee of success; you have to learn from the doing for it to count, and it turns out that some common obstacles make this hard.

You can’t force experience either; trying too hard can be just as bad (if not worse) than slogging through the same old motions. We’ll take a look at what you need to create an efficient learning environment using feedback, fun, and failure; see the dangers of deadlines; and see how to gain experience virtually with mental grooving.

Manage Focus

Managing your attention and focus is the next critical step in your journey. I’ll share with you some tricks, tips, and pointers to help you manage the flood of knowledge, information, and insights that you need to gain experience and learn. We live in information-rich times, and it’s easy to get so swamped under the daily demands of our jobs that we have no chance to advance our careers. Let’s try to fix that and increase your attention and focus.

We’ll take a look at how to optimize your current context, manage those pesky interruptions better, and see why interruptions are such cognitive train wrecks. We’ll look at why you need to defocus in order to focus better in the mental marinade and manage your knowledge in a more deliberate manner.

Beyond Expertise

Finally, we’ll take a quick look at why change is harder than it looks, and I’ll offer suggestions for what you can do tomorrow morning to get started.

I’ll share what I think lies beyond expertise and how to get there.

So, sit back, grab your favorite beverage, and let’s take a look at what’s under the hood.

Next Actions

Throughout the book, I’ll suggest “next actions” that you can take to help reinforce and make this material real for you. These might include exercises to do, experiments to try, or habits to start. I’ll list these using checkboxes so you can check the items you’ve done, like this:

• Take a hard look at current problems on your project. Can you spot the different systems involved? Where do they interact? Are these interaction points related to the problems you’re seeing?

• Find three things you’ve analyzed out of context that caused you problems later.

• Put up a sign somewhere near your monitor that reads “Consider the context.”