Great advice for beginners

I hope that everyone watches the full set of four videos of Ira Glass on storytelling from which this comic was excerpted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loxJ3FtCJJA&playnext=1&#...

It's important because you get a different perspective on a "story" from the artist's side, and it gives you an idea of how to communicate: there are moments of "drawing the reader along" with a causal sequence, and "moments of reflection" where you pause and say "here's why you care about this."

If you think about writing a good tutorial, I think everybody understands that it should be incremental knowledge, that you should build upon whatever your students already know. But lots of tutorials are confusing precisely because they lack the other bits. Some tutorials look more like API documentation -- a bunch of disconnected things; no causal narrative goes between them. Other tutorials -- especially in functional programming! -- link together a whole lot of great ideas incrementally, and it's a killer story... and it's never really for anything.

Contrast this with SICP for example, that famous realization which many of us had where you're halfway through this Lisp course and suddenly, out of nowhere, the authors say, "okay, let's introduce the assignment statement." And you have this moment of reflection -- "wait, assignment statements aren't necessary?! ... huh! I guess they weren't! I did a lot of stuff without them already!".

Even if it's a tiny little moment where you mention, "okay, so here's an example of what you were writing before, here's why it's ugly, here's how this new technique does better" -- that sort of short intermezzo can be so amazingly helpful for learning programming that it startles me how often it's missing from tutorials. I think a good understanding of storytelling can help inform how we present information in general. (This especially holds when you draw a distinction between new ideas and news, as Alan Kay does in the SRII 2011 keynote: http://vimeo.com/22463791 .)

Thanks for sharing the video link. Will check it out :)

Perhaps I'm getting all external-locus-of-control here, but I actually think most people get it when it comes to creation being hard. I give them credit on that. I don't think there's actually an epidemic of people who fail to thrive because they struggle in the intermediate creative stages. I think people understand that it's a part of the process everyone has to go through. It's intellectually demanding, but if you can enjoy the small victories, you can get through it happily (and then will remember those times fondly.)

The problem is That Work Shit. No, I don't mean that people are averse to working hard. The contrary is true. Ever see a programmer blow up on his jackass-interrupter boss, because he wanted to keep working done rather than deal with an impromptu status ping? People like to work. They do. Leave them alone and most people will be productive. At least, most people whose efforts will be worth anything will be productive. Who cares if the bottom 20% use freedom and autonomy to slack off? They won't deliver much value no matter how hard you beat them.

Unfortunately, most of us are stuck in this corporate matrix where even cognitive 1-percenters have to sell themselves to middlemen called "managers" who take all the credit, and to take subordinate roles because a bunch of rent-seeking assholes have (in most settings) taken everything important or interesting for themselves. The result is a culture where there's no improvement and where motivation dies, usually around age 30. (People have kids, then decide that their creative existences are over and commence living vicariously through miniature creatures genetically similar to themselves, then find themselves chagrined when most of those turn out to be separate people with their own agendas.) We see this in the shitpile that is 95% of software engineering, where improvement never happens and horrible code gets written and dumbasses make all the decisions.

I don't think people get burned out in the intermediate stages because they're lazy or because they have a childish need for praise. I think they get to a point where they realize they're still not getting enough back to compensate for the obscene (artificially high, due to phony scarcities and corrupt) costs of living so they cut off and go back to their boring paid work.

I can totally attest to this, but for me the story played out a bit differently. My v1 designs for the company I'm working on now look like trash, but at the time, I tried to convince myself that I liked them a lot. Deep down, I know they weren't fantastic, and people told me this, but I equated the quality of the work with the number of hours I'd spent.

Turns out, a lot of what I spent time on was learning specific UX techniques from different places that looked pretty ugly when they were all smashed together. I think it's analogous to programming (when you learn a concept, you kind of want to force it into the project you're working on, even if there is little to no relevance).

All in all, I agree with the message. Becoming a great designer takes a lot of patience, hard work, and iteration. You have to be okay with throwing entire pieces away in pursuit of something better.