The next 10,000 hours

Well, I’ve been reading again (always a bad move) – first Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, which talks about the 10,000 hour rule.  He theorises that to truly master something, you need to spend 10,000 hours practising it.

I’m an old-school geek – I started coding in year 7 on my sister’s university account, in Basic; and I spent many, many years coding bad procedural programs in Basic, Assembler, Pascal, and C.  I racked up at least 10,000 hours of procedural coding – sometimes with cool results, but generally it was pretty ugly.

Somewhere along the way, I got paid to code, and eventually I discovered C++, and a while later, Java and object-oriented ideas, and a more "professional" approach to coding; which, sadly, often meant forays into realms of ugly complexity commonly associated with "professional" coding – it can be summed up with a pile of acronyms, most of which still make me break out in a cold sweat – UML, STL, J2EE, Corba, RUP, COM, MDA … I shudder to go on.  Another 10,000+ years of ‘practice’ – and a lot of useful lessons learned, though mostly about what kind of things to avoid, and what kind of promises to be sceptical about.

Thankfully, things got somewhat better after that – moving to Agile development made the world a lot more sane; test-driven and behaviour-driven development have drastically improved code quality and transparency; and I discovered shiny new languages like Ruby, which re-introduced me to Functional Programming, which led to Clojure and Scala and a host of new ideas and technologies.  And all of these connected me to new communities of people with new ideas… This starts to look like a great 10,000 hours!

That brings me to the other book I read recently – from the always excellent Pragmatic Press, "The Passionate Programmer", all about building and enhancing your IT career.  It helped me to realise I should pull my socks up, update my websites and my blogs, and actually share what interests me with the world, rather than geeking along in a vacuum.

So hence this long ramble and this re-branded blog.  I have a pile of things to write about – a short list includes:

• My (so far pretty limited) experiments with Google Wave
• My team’s great use of Cucumber for Behaviour Driven Development, including some cool wiki integration
• Some half-formed thoughts I’ve had on unifying several things I’ve heard and read on Agile and Lean Values, Principles, and Practices – not sure I’m anywhere near a grand unified theory of everything, but if my thoughts turn into something coherent, I’ll post them
• My next big project – tentatively titled "Kanban Sync", it will use an Augmented Reality interface on a smartphone to synchronize a physical card wall (a.k.a. Kanban board) with back-end tracking tools such as Mingle or Agile Bench or Jira.  This is still in very early planning stages – but if it works, it’ll be very cool indeed.

Plus, of course, whatever actually comes up…

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized and tagged agile, lean, meta, pragmatic, rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.