Responses to 29 Habits article:

3. Acknowledge that micro-decisions matter. Small decisions, such as naming variables do make a difference. I encountered this at the Try Turing weekend. While attempting to write Ruby code for a number guessing game, I had a user inputted number. I wrote code to verify that this was an integer using a second variable. I named these variables 'guess' and 'answer'. I quickly realized these were bad names since it was confusing which was which. In the future I will choose better variable names.

6. Code is cheap. Someone should not be afraid to delete a lot of code, even if they put a lot of time and effort into writing it. If its not what you need, get rid of it. This reminds me of something a professor said during my freshman year of film school, "don't fall in love with your footage." A shot might be visually beautiful and have taken a lot of effort to get, but if it doesn't serve your story and work with the edit, get rid of it. I have seen projects people did where they felt compelled to use things that don't work because they put lots of hard work into them. This makes the final product suffer.

14. Never accept freelance work in an unfamiliar technology. As a former freelancer, I have learned this the hard way. Lack of familiarity with the technology makes it virtually impossible to estimate the amount of time necessary to complete a project, and therefore make a reasonable bid. I agreed to do a sound mixing project in Pro Tools once, which I was unfamiliar with at the time. I vastly underbid, and ended up working for less than minimum wage.


Response to Checklist article

The NPR story with Atul Gawande examined the complexity in modern medicine, and how implementing checklists can reduce mistakes and save lives. The increasing complexity in medicine mirrors changes in technology, and while problems in code aren't usually life and death matters, similar approaches with checklists could be effective. No matter how smart or experienced someone is, when dealing with an incredibly complex system, such as a large computer application or the human body, mistakes are not only possible, they are inevitable. Anything that can serve as a procedural aide, such as a checklist, is likely to have substantive benefits.

Response to Strength-based approach:

Evaluating people's strengths and assigning them to teams based on those strengths is a good way to get the most effective productivity from people. I believe that two of my greatest strengths are the ability to learn quickly, and the ability to be a creative problem solver. I certainly hope to improve on these. One thing that I read today which relates to that was from the Firehose article discussing inflection points in learning coding, and gaining strength in learning how to figure things out for myself. I am interested to learn the results from a StrengthFinder evaluation as well.