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How To Be Fucking Awesome

gilesbowkett.blogspot.com

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Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#71

Post by giles_bowkett »

plinkplonk wrote: post #55

how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This seems to be fundamentally different from programming. I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?

I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other words write a bunch of regular expressions and make them as good as you can.

In the Ruby community we have the Ruby Quiz. I'm pretty sure that's copied from some other community, I think Perl. Every programming language community has practices of this nature.

It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. How many times will you write a regular expression in your life? There's no element of repetition there? The literature on deliberate practice cites Mozart, Bobby Fischer, and Bill Gates. Body memory has nothing to do with it.

The feedback comes from sharing with others, as in the Ruby Quiz, or benchmarking your code, or posting it on a blog. Another form of feedback would be seeing if your programs run at all. ;-)

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#72

Post by aneesh »

mdakin wrote: post #64
aneesh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loving what you do is necessary, but not sufficient. What you do should be at the intersection of what you love and what you're good at.

How do you know you're good at something a priori without spending the 10,000 hours to find out empirically?

You do what statisticians do ... take a small sample and estimate.

Spend 20 hours each doing 10 different things, and then pick 2-3 of them to spend 200 hours doing. Then pick the one. While it may take 10,000 hours to be truly awesome, you can probably get a sense of being "good" at something in a much smaller amount of time.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#73

Post by aneesh »

giles_bowkett wrote: post #68
beaudeal wrote: post #14

I found this really interesting, because we covered this exact topic in a psychology course that I took while in university, and I think that it is often mis-quoted / mis-used. The conclusion that was drawn from scientific research was that the vast majority of experts all shared a common trait - they all had at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (not that anyone who practiced for 10,000 hours would definitely…

"They also noted that some fields of expertise (such as the NBA) have built-in physical constraints (ex: height) which must be considered." Mugsy Bogues.

I fondly remember his days playing for the Hornets. But he's the exception, not the rule.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#74

Post by hs »

if u buy that 10% improvement by 10x effort and mapping the 10000 hours:

10000 -> 99.9% 1000 -> 99% 100 -> 90%

100 hrs is about 13 weeks (a quarter) of 3 uni 1hr credits + 1.5hr practice = 13 * 3 * (1 + 1.5)

if u take deliberate practice as vector, that's only the magnitude part

the direction part is what to study and that ends up being more important

given a constraint of 100 hrs, a nonprogrammer will end up becoming more productive studying lisp compared to java

but of course, to say such programmer is 90% better than average is too much :D ... and controversial

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#75

Post by sireat »

There is one important thing: some of those hours should come before certain age. For many disciplines/fields it is under 18 and for almost all it is certainly 25. In other words, if you start practicing basketball at age 37, you are not going to make it to NBA even if you put in 20000 hours of deliberate practice. While this principle seems obvious for largely physical pursuits, it holds true for purely mental fields, as well, be it chess, programming or piano playing.

Re: How To Be Fucking Awesome

#76

Post by plinkplonk »

giles_bowkett wrote: post #71
plinkplonk wrote: post #55

how would someone do "deliberate practice" with programming anyway? Music, basketball etc involve "body memory" where repetitions of identical movements help. This seems to be fundamentally different from programming. I am guessing programming "practice" would involve writing more ambitious programs? where would the feedback come from?

I explained this in my blog a few posts ago. You write programs to focus on some particular aspect of your programming that you want to make better. I think it should be obvious. You use functional programming idioms - write programs that have using functional programming idioms well as their only purpose. You use regular expressions - write programs that only exist to make you better at regular expressions. In other…

"It's absurd to suggest that deliberate practice has anything to do with body memory intrinsically. "

Since no one actually made that claim - the intrinsically part that is - ..... :)

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