How to program

The video above was recorded as a keynote at RailsConf 2017. It was also presented at the inaugural DeconstructConf, which means the talk’s design benefited richly from my fear of disappointing the masterful Gary Bernhardt.

The premise

Programmers are really good at talking about what programs are. Most people will invest a decade just to get a handle on the massive compendium of jargon and metaphors we have created for describing the structure and behavior of finished programs.

But you know what programmers aren’t so practiced at articulating? How they program.

Specifically, we don’t have very evolved ways to convey clearly the details of the countless actions, feelings, and thoughts that go into writing software. We’re simply not used to talking about how we code (short of pointing to a prescribed principle or process that we do our best to imitate). My favorite Computer Science professor liked to say, “be wary; any major that has ‘Science’ in its name, isn’t”.

Surely, the fact we struggle to ask and answer “how” questions about programming has tremendous implications affecting how we learn programming, the nature of our work, the colleagues we keep, and even impacts broad industry trends. It seems obvious that we should make an effort to get better at understanding, improving, and sharing our various programming workflows. As a humble beginning, this talk lays out an approach for:

1. Identifying your unique disposition as a programmer
2. Introspecting how you act, feel, and think in a variety of contexts
3. Using that introspection to capitalize on or mitigate those actions, feelings, or thoughts
4. Sharing your personally-tailored workflow with others, so they might find aspects that would be useful in their own practice

The Searls-Briggs® Type Indicator™

A conceit of the talk is that I’m filling out a goofy little survey that establishes four buckets of, for want of a better phrase, “programmer personality types”. The quiz is a bit of a joke and not scientific at all, but despite this was very popular (things that could also be said of its namesake). If you like, you can take the quiz at testdouble.com/salt and have your result e-mailed to you.

In the first weekend after I performed the talk, the quiz had over 4000 respondents, so clearly there is an untapped demand for this sort of inquiry. Here’s a breakdown of your predelictions, in aggregate:

Trait #1 - Fearless vs. sensitive

As you can see, there’s a healthy distribution between the two. In the talk, I identify as sensitive, meaning emotions play a really strong role in my work (both helpfully and not), which leads me to more introspection and empathy, but at the cost of lacking much courage under fire—much less excitement amid volatile circumstances.

I’m a bit envious of the majority of respondents who identified with more fearless markers, especially the 67% who prefer to hear all requirements up-front without worry of feeling overwhelmed.

Trait #2 - Inventive vs. aesthetic

This bucket is a rough analogue for where folks land on the spectrum between order and chaos. Inventive types are the ones who eagerly try out the latest and greatest languages & frameworks, whereas aesthetic-leaners (like me) tend to roll their eyes at how each subsequent cohort of new programmers insists on reinventing MVC every six months.

In the talk, the aesthetic archetype is summarized as valuing consistency and an idyllic vision of how code ought to be structured, even if those ideals are—to an extent—subject to the fashions of the moment. Inventive types, meanwhile, will gladly trade purist ideals for the opportunity to cover a wide breadth of tools & frameworks if it yields more novel interesting experiences while writing software.

Trait #3 - Naive vs. leery

Being leery myself, I was not surprised to see the majority of respondents rated “Naive”. Both are negatively-connoted words, but don’t take offense—this bucket measures bad habits at both extremes.

Naive developers tend to assume things like “software is good”, “metrics are useful”, and “following the process is valuable”. Leery developers are more likely to worry software is becoming more fragile over time, that metrics without context lead to abuse, and that rigid processes can create more waste than not.

Trait #4 - Economical vs. thorough

This was the most extreme result, and a few Test Double agents suggested that the skew is partly because this talk was presented before a predominantly Rubyist audience. Ruby and Rails, each being well over 10 years old, are at a state of maturity where thoroughness is both typical and important to long-term success. Had we presented this at a Node.js or React conference, where a larger proportion of the audience’s lived experience was at an earlier stage of the ecosystem maturity curve, we probably would have seen a different outcome.

What this bucket measures is the extent to which a developer insists on baking in code “quality” (whatever “quality” means) even if it slows them down, as opposed to preferring to get code out the door as quickly as possible by shedding affordances like tests and buy-in from others. As with the other buckets, there’s no correct answer. Economical developers are who you want for rapid-prototyping or when the code’s primary value is to solicit feedback. Thorough programmers, meanwhile, are well-suited for deftly navigating complex systems that can’t afford a “move fast and break things” approach.

Next steps

If this talk resonated with you, I’d encourage you to spend some time tuning the same sort of feedback loops in your own work. After you’ve had some time to reflect and tweak your process, share it with others! I’d love to hear about it via email or twitter.

If you’re at a point in your journey where you need to find an employer who’ll trust you with the level of autonomy needed to take these steps, that’s, well, why we created Test Double in the first place! We’d be happy to talk to you about joining our team.

00:00

- My name is Searls, my non-Twitter name is Justin,

00:03

feel free to call me either.

00:05

This is what my face looked like in 2011

00:07

and thanks to how social media branding works

00:09

I'm now stuck with it forever.

00:12

I work for a company called Test Double,

00:14

we're a software agency who's on a mission

00:17

to improve how the world writes software.

00:19

You can learn more about us up at that URL.

00:23

The title of this presentation is How to Program,

00:27

and it's a rumination on a word workflow,

00:29

two-part word, work being what programs are,

00:32

their structure and behavior,

00:34

flow being how we program our thoughts and actions.

00:38

And when I look back on my experience learning

00:41

as a computer science student,

00:43

they taught me things like data structures

00:45

and P vs NP and Big O analysis and cryptography,

00:48

and not very much about how to think or how to work.

00:52

And bootschools nowadays are actually analogous,

00:55

even though there are more market practical skills

00:57

like web standards, and system tooling,

01:00

and languages and frameworks, not so much how to think

01:02

through problems and solve stuff, and really write code.

01:06

And you might think that's the job of thoughtleaders,

01:08

'cause the word thought is right there, but really,

01:10

thoughtleaders, when they're talking about design patterns

01:12

or SOLID principles, even when they talk about Agile

01:14

and Test-Driven Development,

01:17

those are nice 'cause they describe work activities

01:20

but it's pretty discreet and mostly about

01:22

how people interact,

01:23

not so much how to think through things.

01:25

So it's reasonable to ask when do we actually learn

01:29

flow as programmers, who teaches us how to think?

01:32

And if you're lucky, 10 years into your career,

01:35

you'll stumble upon, or somebody will show you

01:40

the only productivity tip

01:41

that any of us have ever been taught,

01:43

the Pomodoro technique,

01:45

(audience laughing and applauding)

01:48

where you work for 20 minutes

01:49

and then you take a three minute break, it's really awesome,

01:52

but honestly it kinda feels like you put 10 years

01:54

of hard service in to get a $4 plastic pin,

02:00

it's kinda insulting that that's the best

02:01

that we have to offer.

02:03

So sure, somehow we all learned what programs are,

02:07

but I'd hazard a guess that most of us,

02:09

nobody ever really taught us how to program.

02:12

Look no further than a Google search, how to program,

02:15

and you get a whole bunch of terrible results,

02:18

starting with the traditional way

02:19

of teaching people how to program.

02:21

You start with nothing and then somebody shows you

02:23

a completely finished example, the finished product,

02:25

what the program should be,

02:27

and then as for connecting it it's good luck, have fun.

02:30

And every single computer science assignment

02:32

that I had in college really resembled

02:35

the How to Draw an Owl comic,

02:37

where you start with two circles and then

02:40

go draw the rest of the owl.

02:41

(audience laughing)

02:45

And I spent entire weekends cooped up in a lab

02:47

trying to figure out, staring at a blank editor,

02:51

and no idea how to write code.

02:53

And it was that moment that I realized

02:54

that programming's almost a philosophical activity

02:57

that happens mostly in our heads.

03:00

Of course we've now innovated quite a lot

03:02

in programmer education since I was in college,

03:05

now we, instead of just one big finished example,

03:09

we've broken it up into two or three steps

03:11

over the course of a book or a screencast,

03:14

but very rarely does the prose or the explanation

03:17

actually explain the thinking

03:18

of how to make that thing more real.

03:22

It might take years before you're able to imitate

03:25

even an example application from a book.

03:28

But that word imitation stands out

03:29

because I think that most of us

03:31

are just imitating other programmers,

03:33

we see somebody successful or well-known,

03:35

and we just try to do things

03:36

like they seem to be doing things,

03:38

and that's how we learn and get by.

03:41

You can see that this is endemic in our society

03:44

as programmers because we're really bad at how questions.

03:47

If I ask how do I know when to create a new method,

03:49

when should I break this thing up

03:50

into more than one thing?

03:52

You get really unsophisticated responses,

03:54

like, "Methods should be about three lines long."

03:56

(audience laughing)

04:00

And when my wife, she likes telling this story,

04:05

when she was in first grade, Becky,

04:08

she was told by a teacher that sentences were two lines long

04:13

and so then dutifully, for the next several years

04:16

until she was corrected,

04:17

she just stamped a period at the end of every other line.

04:20

(audience laughing)

04:22

And that's funny 'cause she's not an adult,

04:25

and yet here we are with these unsophisticated ideas like,

04:28

"eh, methods should be about three lines long,"

04:30

and no ability to communicate above and beyond that.

04:33

But let's say in spite of all of this,

04:34

somehow you write a really good program one day

04:37

and you're really proud of it, and really happy.

04:39

And I ask you, okay, so what actions were productive

04:43

or unproductive that led you to that point?

04:47

Or what thoughts led you there,

04:49

which thought processes were successful or unsuccessful,

04:52

would you be able to answer those questions?

04:54

Most of us wouldn't be able to,

04:55

and it leads to rampant insecurity

04:57

from how we educate programmers, to the work that we do,

05:00

to the colleagues that we keep, and the overall industry.

05:03

Now 99% of the work that I have done

05:05

as a professional programmer could be boiled down as

05:08

a business person trying to get a spreadsheet

05:10

onto the internet.

05:11

(audience laughing)

05:13

And yet it's taken me 10 years or so

05:15

to even become a merely competent programmer,

05:18

clearly something's wrong

05:19

in how we teach people to program.

05:21

And this industry is 60 or 70 years old,

05:24

but we're still searching for silver bullets,

05:26

we always are externalizing the problem

05:28

and hoping the next language, or framework,

05:29

or library, or process is gonna suddenly

05:32

make programming explicable, and it never works out.

05:36

And think about that situation

05:40

where everyone's either making stuff up as they go

05:42

or pretending they understand it,

05:44

who's gonna succeed in that environment?

05:45

It's genuinely brilliant people

05:47

and people with the overconfidence of having been told

05:50

that they're brilliant their whole lives.

05:52

So imagine that you don't look like other programmers

05:55

and you walk into a room, and you lack that privilege

05:57

of having been told that you're brilliant by society,

06:00

this is a terrifying line of work to walk into

06:02

'cause no one can actually explain how to program.

06:05

And I think that if you wanna make programming

06:07

a more diverse and inclusive industry,

06:09

we really need to solve this.

06:12

(audience applauding)

06:18

And it's obvious that the industry has no idea

06:21

how software works, because they're constantly

06:24

analogizing it to literally any other industry,

06:27

like construction, or design, or manufacturing.

06:33

And because of that they control the handful of things

06:37

that they do understand, like estimates,

06:39

and when people work, and where they work,

06:41

instead of the true nut of it

06:43

which is how we think as software developers

06:45

and how we solve problems.

06:47

And so how do we fix it?

06:50

Well fortunately, yesterday at Keynote

06:51

DHH offered us one solution.

06:55

(audience laughing)

06:58

But I'm gonna talk about a different one,

07:00

I'm gonna talk about feedback loops,

07:01

because programmers, through compilation,

07:03

and through testing,

07:04

we're used to establishing feedback loops

07:06

to make forward progress, and we can do the same things

07:09

inside of our heads improving as developers.

07:12

We're gonna practice this today

07:14

by reflecting on the actions we take

07:16

and whether they're successful or not,

07:17

and how to improve our actions.

07:19

You can do the same thing for feelings

07:21

and actually reflect on your emotional state

07:23

so that you can reinforce positive emotions

07:25

or mitigate negative ones.

07:27

And, spoiler alert, you can actually think about thinking,

07:32

(audience chuckling)

07:33

and produce better thought processes

07:35

that turn out to be more productive.

07:37

This is really the path to programmer enlightenment,

07:41

but I realize that we're starting from scratch here,

07:43

we gotta walk before we can run,

07:45

and ask yourselves what do we do with teams

07:48

that are still emotionally immature

07:50

they struggle to even talk about feelings?

07:53

Well, we hand them crappy personality tests

07:56

like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

07:58

If you're not familiar with the Myers-Briggs

08:00

just know that it's the worst type system.

08:02

(audience laughing)

08:07

The reason we rag on it is 'cause it puts people

08:10

into these silly buckets like ENTJ and ISFP,

08:13

and the implication is that there's only

08:14

16 types of people out there,

08:16

but we know that there's much, much more.

08:18

But when you're starting from zero,

08:20

16 starts sounding pretty good,

08:23

so that's why today I am pleased to announce

08:25

the Searls-Briggs Type Indicator.

08:27

(audience laughing)

08:29

And instead of pontificating to you today

08:32

about how to program,

08:33

and dictating that this is the magical way,

08:35

this is the silver bullet,

08:37

instead I'm just gonna humbly take my own test,

08:39

show you how I feel and my inclinations

08:41

and my personality, and what I've done

08:43

over the course of my career

08:45

to reflect and improve, and result in better outcomes

08:47

as a programmer.

08:49

To do that we need an example feature,

08:51

so let's make one up.

08:52

Like I mentioned, I work at a company Test Double,

08:54

and we have always been a distributed company,

08:57

but we're still learning that that does not mean

08:58

evenly distributed.

09:00

So if you've got a flat organization

09:02

you might think that there's all these

09:03

spontaneous relationships that form,

09:05

but of course that's not accurate.

09:07

We all have our assigned pairs

09:09

and we all phone home to an account manager.

09:11

Our org chart looks like one of those

09:12

1980's suction cup ball things,

09:16

but there's nothing wrong with that per se,

09:18

unless, say two people on the team

09:19

both really wanna learn Elm.

09:21

But there's nothing systemically

09:23

that's gonna get those two people

09:24

talking together necessarily,

09:26

so somebody raised the idea,

09:27

why don't we have virtual coffee dates on the team,

09:29

and just randomly assign people to talk to each other

09:32

that otherwise wouldn't be.

09:35

There's actually an expression from math though,

09:37

it's called The Handshake Problem,

09:38

which just calculates the number of potential relationships

09:41

of any group of people,

09:43

and you see that there's just tons of them.

09:45

And so what the system should do

09:46

is just send an email every week

09:49

to pair up people who might not otherwise

09:51

be talking to one another,

09:52

and tell 'em go spend 15 minutes

09:53

on this Google Hangout URL and chat about something,

09:56

it doesn't have to be about work.

09:58

And so we're gonna put my test to the test

09:59

and build this feature together this morning as a group.

10:02

And the first bucket that I'm gonna put us in

10:04

is Sensitive versus Fearless,

10:06

and the first question is,

10:08

I prefer hearing all requirements up front,

10:11

even if I can't tackle them all right away.

10:14

I strongly disagree with that,

10:15

I get overwhelmed really easily.

10:17

Two, adding to a long function

10:19

feels like more code just won't fit.

10:22

Absolutely, once I hit a certain amount of complexity

10:25

I can't imagine adding another case.

10:28

Three, I look forward to being assigned

10:29

to new projects and teams.

10:32

No way, new projects give me night sweats.

10:36

Four, I often feel paralyzed

10:38

while staring at a blank editor screen.

10:40

Yeah, I already admitted to that.

10:43

So does that make me Sensitive or Fearless?

10:45

Pretty obvious in this case, I'm Sensitive,

10:47

a big part of being Sensitive

10:48

is that I get overwhelmed easily.

10:51

So think about this feature and all I've gotta do,

10:53

create pairs, great, that's not so hard,

10:55

but I do have to go and send the email,

10:57

and I also have to look up all these people

10:59

from a database.

11:00

But I gotta be careful not to repeat

11:02

so I gotta randomize the pairings,

11:04

and I gotta not repeat week to week either,

11:06

which means I also have to persist them.

11:08

So it's a lotta work, so I don't wanna think about all that,

11:11

I just wanna focus on the core problem.

11:13

So my inclination is to just do that,

11:15

put a unit around it, think hard about the problem,

11:17

I could do my little Test-Driven Development thing,

11:19

and I'm feeling really good about that unit of code,

11:21

so then I go to the controller that's gonna call it,

11:24

and I realize that the method signature

11:26

doesn't quite line up.

11:27

Or somebody else might say, hey, this unit you just made

11:30

is doing all this extra redundant work

11:32

that's actually handled elsewhere.

11:34

My inclination was to overcome that paralysis that I felt

11:38

and find some productivity by just putting on blinders.

11:41

And I fell into that rabbit hole often enough

11:42

that I had to think and reflect,

11:44

and actually have inverted how I work as a programmer.

11:46

So what I just showed you is often called

11:48

bottom-up programming, but now I practice top-down,

11:51

it works better for me.

11:52

You might also call it outside-in,

11:55

where I think from the perspective of the controller,

11:57

at the top level entry point, and I start there,

11:59

and I ask what do I need?

12:01

Well I need something to create these pairs,

12:02

and when your brain is focused that way,

12:05

the caller knows exactly what inputs are available,

12:07

what output it's gonna want,

12:09

and it's also a way to minimize waste,

12:11

because it has the broader context in terms of

12:15

what guard clauses need to be inserted

12:17

or can be omitted.

12:19

The other aspect of being Sensitive

12:20

is that I'm really afraid of failure,

12:22

and when you work outside-in,

12:23

you do have to juggle all these different concerns at once

12:26

which can, again, be overwhelming.

12:28

And so what I try to do is just rush into solving it,

12:32

my inclination is just to open up an editor

12:34

and prove that I can write this code,

12:36

so I start with a module, and I make a method,

12:38

I go load up a bunch of users, I loop over them,

12:41

I skip anyone who's already had their hand shaken,

12:43

otherwise I'll go an add a tuple

12:45

to represent a pairing, and then I'll go

12:47

and slam it through some mailer,

12:49

and now I feel really good,

12:50

'cause I just proved I could do it.

12:52

And someone will remind me,

12:53

remember you gotta randomize it,

12:55

and you don't wanna leave out the 15th person every week,

12:58

and you've also gotta prevent repeats from happening

13:01

week to week, and now I'm terrified because

13:03

this is already really dense,

13:04

I don't know how I'm gonna make it more complicated.

13:06

And I'm very familiar with this corner of the room

13:09

as a result.

13:11

So I keep painting myself into this corner

13:13

and the root cause is fear, I'm afraid of failing,

13:16

I'm afraid of big things

13:17

that I don't know how to break down.

13:19

So my solution is avoid that fear

13:21

by breaking things down in a systematized way,

13:23

give myself some help.

13:25

And I've been practicing over the last few years,

13:27

iterating on an approach to Test-Driven Development

13:29

that I call Discovery Testing,

13:31

and it's really an effort in breaking big, scary problems

13:34

into smaller, more manageable ones.

13:37

It works with, I start with just a test

13:39

of that top level thing.

13:41

So I write a single test case, I invoke the thing,

13:43

and then I ask myself a crucial question,

13:46

what's the code that I wish I had,

13:47

that I could defer and hand this work out to?

13:50

Well something to find these hands,

13:51

something to determine who shakes whose hand,

13:53

something to mail them and then persist them.

13:56

Then I use my test double library,

13:57

which in Ruby is "gimme",

13:59

so it creates these four fake things,

14:01

and I set up a stubbing,

14:02

so I say, hey, when finds_hands is called

14:04

it gets you this thing to symbolize the hands,

14:07

and if I pass that to thing that determines the shakes,

14:09

another stubbing'll give me these handshakes.

14:12

This is all the test set-up I need

14:13

to be able to actually assert

14:15

that I mail out all those handshakes

14:18

and that I persist them.

14:19

Now this is an unusual-looking test

14:20

to a lot of you I'm sure,

14:22

but what it does is it perfectly specifies

14:24

the behavior of that top level unit.

14:26

And so I get this test to pass,

14:28

and I never have to worry about that top level again.

14:31

In fact, if you list out all the files that shake out

14:33

from just getting that test to pass,

14:34

now I have a pretty clear work cut out for me,

14:38

I know exactly what I need to do,

14:40

I can start making forward progress.

14:42

So I start off with a big, scary thing,

14:44

but as I build that test I identity the units

14:46

that I would need to actually carve out the work,

14:49

and instead of one big scary thing,

14:50

I now have four more digestible problems

14:53

that I can focus on, and if any of them are scary,

14:55

I now have in my back pocket a tool that I can use

14:58

to reduce and break things up even further.

15:04

The second bucket I'm gonna talk about

15:05

is Inventive versus Aesthetic,

15:07

so there's some quiz questions to determine my type.

15:11

Question one, it's more important to build the right thing

15:13

than to build the thing right.

15:15

Eh, these are both important,

15:16

but I'm more implementation-focused.

15:19

Question two, I love experimenting with new tools,

15:21

frameworks, and build systems.

15:23

Not at all, I do spend a lot of my time

15:25

in open source here, but it's expressly

15:26

so I don't have to worry about it at work.

15:29

Question three, I strive to write visually appealing code,

15:32

down to syntax and symmetry.

15:34

Absolutely, I don't know why,

15:35

but I really like pretty, symmetrical code.

15:39

Question four, it's boring when all the code in a project

15:41

is structured similarly.

15:43

I disagree, I really like consistency in code.

15:46

So does that make me Inventive or Aesthetic?

15:48

Well I think it makes me a little Aesthetic.

15:50

And one part of being Aesthetic is I have refined taste.

15:54

Now the problem with taste is that nobody knows what it is

15:58

(audience laughing)

16:00

until somebody on your team says, you know what,

16:02

I'd prefer a 300-line function

16:04

to all these well-named little small units

16:06

that you keep creating.

16:07

And then my face looks like this.

16:10

(audience laughing)

16:13

That's taste.

16:14

(audience laughing)

16:17

And so why do programmers develop taste, well it's obvious,

16:20

when you're staring at a blank editor screen,

16:22

there are infinitely many ways to solve any given problem,

16:25

we need something to constrain ourselves,

16:28

some patterns to follow to just not be stuck

16:30

in analysis paralysis forever.

16:33

And that's why I think that prose is a much better analogy

16:36

to writing software than construction is.

16:39

In fact, I think of programming as just communication

16:41

to the next developer who's gonna pick it up,

16:44

and it's just hard because it has to happen

16:47

through this filter that's just formal enough

16:49

for an interpreter or a compiler to understand.

16:51

And so when I hear this feedback I reflect,

16:54

and I take it to mean as a critique,

16:57

that maybe I'm writing code that's meant to be read

17:00

by myself as opposed to another human,

17:02

because the other developer, they're not in the room,

17:04

so I tend to write code that I think that I would wanna read

17:07

and this leads to self-centered design.

17:10

So if I just write a book on design patterns

17:12

I'm gonna create a bunch of units like services,

17:14

and factories, and repositories,

17:16

and I'm gonna feel really brilliant having done all this,

17:18

but then somebody else could list out

17:20

all of the files I just created in one big listing.

17:24

From their perspective, it's gonna be inpenetrably complex,

17:27

it's a forest of all these objects,

17:29

no idea how things are gonna work.

17:31

And so now when I hear that critique,

17:33

they've got a pretty good point.

17:35

And I found this happen on team after team,

17:37

and what it made me realize is

17:38

I gotta start working differently

17:40

to make my code more discoverable and approachable

17:42

for other developers, and now I do things much differently.

17:47

It started with realizing programs are directed graphs,

17:50

so all of these units are really kind of nodes in this graph

17:53

and all of the edges or vertices are function calls.

17:56

So the Locator calls the Service,

17:58

which calls this Repository, which calls this Mapper,

18:00

which instantiates Hands,

18:01

Service also calls this Factory,

18:02

which calls that thing and that thing.

18:05

And we already, 'cause we think of programs this way,

18:07

we have some taste, we have some constraining principles

18:10

that we share.

18:11

Like for instance, if this Repository

18:13

were to call this Service, we would all,

18:15

wait a second, that's a dependency cycle,

18:17

we realize there's a risk of an infinite recursion

18:20

or stack overflow there.

18:22

And so most of the programs that we write as developers

18:24

try to by acyclic diagraphs.

18:27

And remember my purpose here is just to prove

18:29

that I'm right, I wanna tell this person, no,

18:32

small units is better than 300 lines objectively,

18:35

and to do that I thought maybe

18:38

there's a liberating constraint,

18:39

maybe if I refine my taste further I can solve this problem.

18:43

And where I landed was, I want to express all of my features

18:46

not as just general graphs, but as trees,

18:49

because a tree is just a special subtype of a graph,

18:52

you can take this exact same menagerie of units

18:54

and organize it in a tree shape

18:55

where you have your value objects on the left

18:58

and the feature behavior on the right.

19:00

And now if it's true that I have any needless indirection,

19:03

it stands out in a tree 'cause it's just got one child,

19:06

so that service locator, yeah,

19:07

I can probably get rid of that.

19:09

And if somebody asks, if what they're looking for

19:11

is how to compare two hands,

19:13

they can search the tree much more easily and quickly

19:16

than just a gigantic directory of files

19:19

and find what they're looking for,

19:20

so it's more discoverable.

19:23

The other aspect of my Aesthetic is I'm a minimalist,

19:25

so when you look at our app you see it's car,

19:28

it drives, you think about what its function is

19:31

and why it exists.

19:33

When I look at our app,

19:34

all I see is the clutter and the mess.

19:36

(audience chuckling)

19:38

And as a minimalist, my productivity goes up

19:40

when things are tidy and symmetrical and terse,

19:43

and it goes down when things are cluttered or inconsistent.

19:46

And what the software's supposed to be doing

19:50

is its essential complexity,

19:52

everything it actually does is its incidental complexity,

19:55

the other stuff,

19:56

think of everything that goes into writing a program.

19:59

You're writing deploy tooling and app config,

20:01

and dependencies, and framework appeasement.

20:04

Then of course there's whatever the app was supposed to do,

20:07

there's style rules, continuous integration,

20:09

build systems, and then of course unnecessary stuff.

20:12

As a minimalist, I'm the person on the project

20:14

who's always chiseling away to try to minimize the amount

20:17

of incidental complexity in the system,

20:20

and trying to maximize the time that the team spends

20:22

on whatever's really important.

20:24

That means I'm always tweaking my code style,

20:27

like maybe I'd start writing a feature behavior

20:29

inside of my model objects,

20:31

but then separate them out into separate units,

20:33

but then maybe make them cullables,

20:35

but maybe ultimately land at module methods.

20:37

These are all fine, you can debate the finer points,

20:40

but at the end of the day they're really six of one,

20:41

half a dozen of the other kinds of arguments.

20:44

And they represent a sort of trap,

20:46

because earlier I said style rules, debating style,

20:49

is a type of incidental complexity

20:51

'cause style is subjective,

20:53

and so it changes around arbitrarily.

20:55

And arbitrary decisions breed inconsistency,

20:58

and, oh it turns out that inconsistency

21:00

is another form of incidental complexity.

21:03

And so, oops.

21:06

Because if on Monday I organize code this way,

21:08

and on Tuesday this way, and Wednesday that way,

21:10

and then by Thursday I've decided this is the best way

21:12

to organize code, everyone's gonna get mad at me,

21:15

because I've just littered 36 custom little styles

21:18

all throughout the system.

21:20

So my temptation to continuously be improving stuff

21:23

actually breeds inconsistency

21:25

and creates bigger messes elsewhere, so I reflected on how,

21:28

I think what was happening is I'd chase

21:30

the local optimization at the expense

21:32

of the global optimization

21:34

of what's best for the overall project.

21:36

And I had to learn to avoid this oscillation

21:39

in my design, and it really required me to just realize

21:42

I'd spend the entire project spinning my tires.

21:46

And so instead I decided

21:48

I need to just lock in these decisions,

21:50

and say we're just gonna do things this style,

21:52

whether or not it's better or worse, it doesn't matter,

21:54

so we can try to carve out time to be productive.

21:56

And as I got better at that, at flexing that muscle,

21:59

I could recognize where I'm spinning my wheels earlier

22:02

and spend more of my time being productive,

22:04

it was a way for me to both be a minimalist

22:06

but also really consistent in my applications,

22:09

even when it meant hewing really strongly

22:11

to arbitrary decisions of things

22:12

that didn't really matter.

22:14

And when you do that,

22:15

especially with your incidental complexity,

22:18

it brings the essential complexity into sharper relief,

22:21

so you can all as a team really just focus,

22:23

spend more time on what your app really needs to do.

22:27

The third bucket is Naive versus Leery.

22:30

Question one, publishing metrics like code coverage

22:32

is always a good idea.

22:34

Eh, I think radical transparency often backfires.

22:38

Question two, writing good commit messages today

22:41

will pay off in the future.

22:43

Secret, I don't actually read commit messages, so eh.

22:48

Three, software teams will make smarter use of time

22:50

under pressure, disagree, I think pressure kills cognition.

22:56

Four, software is generally improving over time

22:58

and we are not doomed.

23:01

(audience laughing)

23:05

Pass, so does that make me Naive or Leery,

23:09

I'm starting to realize this is a pretty obvious test,

23:11

in my case I'm Leery.

23:13

It all starts with my distrust of all of you.

23:16

(audience laughing)

23:18

Because most teams operate in a pressure cooker.

23:21

They're under pressure to get as much stuff done

23:23

as fast as possible, and as a result their brains turn off,

23:27

and it results in really, really bad outcomes.

23:30

In fact it's not very fair to pressure cookers

23:32

because pressure cookers serve a useful purpose.

23:35

(audience chuckling)

23:37

So I'll find another analogy.

23:39

(audience laughing)

23:43

Where we're just being squeezed for all of the Ruby

23:46

and JavaScript that we're worth,

23:48

and again, not being creative, not resulting in good code.

23:54

One person on teams I don't trust

23:56

is I don't trust product owners,

23:57

I love 'em, but I don't trust 'em.

24:00

Back in the Waterfall days, a product owner

24:02

would be able to specify 300 bullet points

24:04

of everything that they ever wanted

24:05

and then foist them upon us, and we'd say,

24:07

hey, this is awful, but in a way at least it was honest,

24:10

they got to articulate everything that they wanted up front,

24:13

it was just us who didn't know how to handle

24:14

that much complexity.

24:16

Scrum and Agile stuff gave us a little bit of a backbone

24:20

and we said, no sir, you only get one index card at a time,

24:23

and in fact that's gonna be 20 points,

24:25

and I made up what points mean.

24:27

(audience laughing)

24:30

So naturally, then it becomes a debate of,

24:32

no, I think it's five points, and any system can be gamed,

24:37

and really savvy product owners I know

24:39

are really good at this.

24:40

Like oh, you know, this is not that complex,

24:42

it's just a little cartoon whale,

24:43

you guys can do that right, you have time.

24:45

And we'll say, oh yeah sure, we can do that,

24:47

and then we realize it's much more complex

24:49

than we really thought, and by then they're out to lunch

24:52

and we're left holding the bag.

24:55

So I don't trust product owners.

24:58

Of course someone I trust even less than product owners

25:00

is other developers, and it's because

25:03

on day one of a feature we neglect to realize

25:05

a very basic fact; our brains can only hold

25:09

so much stuff in them at once.

25:11

And so I think the developers have this biased

25:13

towards size and features to just whatever number of things

25:16

they can hold in their head at a time,

25:18

and naturally, the conclusion that we draw

25:20

about how big our objects and methods should be,

25:23

is the same size, 'cause then that way

25:25

we can just put all of the things in one place,

25:27

it seems like the simple solution.

25:30

But then a month passes and somebody says,

25:32

hey, you need to add a couple additional aspects

25:34

to this feature, it has to do this and this as well.

25:38

Well, that means that the other stuff,

25:40

our brain is finite, we can't keep it all in our heads

25:43

at once anymore, but units,

25:44

we can make files as long as we want, and so we just,

25:47

even though we're incurring a paging cost,

25:50

we can slam in those additional attributes to the feature.

25:54

But it creates a blindspot for us where

25:57

now that we're not thinking about the persistence,

26:00

bugs can creep in through that door.

26:03

And if you work this way, a year passes,

26:05

and pretty soon your units are just gigantic,

26:07

and they look like this and they're riddled with bugs.

26:09

And normally day 400 is the day and I get a phone call

26:11

saying, hey, can you help improve our tests?

26:15

Of course this isn't a testing problem right,

26:17

it's a complexity management problem,

26:19

and it's hard for me when I see this cycle repeat

26:21

over and over again, to let that distrust

26:25

grow into cynicism, and that's not good.

26:28

And in fact, if I'm empathetic I realize

26:29

that at the root of this industry,

26:31

all of us really struggle to predict

26:33

how complexity is gonna change,

26:35

and to guess the complexity of stuff,

26:37

and I do it too.

26:39

And so what I wanna do is change the question,

26:42

and instead focus on how to prepare myself and other people

26:45

for the inevitable increase of complexity,

26:48

'cause on any maintained system, almost any of them,

26:51

complexity's gonna go up over time,

26:52

it's just a matter of what that graph looks like.

26:55

And so like Pascal, I made up Searls' Wager in my head,

26:59

where sure, complexity might remain constant,

27:01

or it might go up.

27:03

And yeah, we could keep writing these brain-sized units,

27:05

or much smaller ones.

27:07

And if complexity doesn't change, no harm no foul,

27:10

it doesn't really matter how we factor our code,

27:12

but if it goes up, we have a lot of evidence

27:14

that these larger units cause problems.

27:16

And the nice thing about small ones is that

27:18

they can actually accommodate some additional complexity

27:20

without too much pain.

27:23

And that's why on day one of every feature

27:24

I break things up into itty bitty tiny units,

27:27

to the point where people criticize me.

27:29

And if you think that my units are too small, don't worry,

27:32

because I trust that you're gonna go

27:33

and make 'em bigger later.

27:35

(audience laughing)

27:37

It'll work out.

27:39

It's a great way, if you struggle with trying to make,

27:42

follow the Single Responsibility Principle

27:44

and have every object do one thing,

27:45

this makes it really, really easy,

27:47

in fact, this is what the tree of functionality

27:49

shook out as in this example,

27:51

and every single unit serves exactly one purpose,

27:54

and they all follow one of three rules

27:56

that I've observed over the years of practicing this.

27:59

The parent nodes are delegator objects,

28:01

they don't really have any logic or branching,

28:04

maybe just one if condition or something,

28:07

they mostly just break up the work

28:08

and hand it off to other things.

28:11

And the way that I happen to do that

28:12

is I use this Test-Driven Design

28:14

where I use test doubles to identify and think up

28:17

what's the code I wish I had

28:18

that would actually do the real work?

28:21

What you wanna try to maximize is these leaf nodes,

28:24

so this is where the core logic of the application is,

28:26

it takes inputs and transforms into some kinda output,

28:30

these are pure functions so you don't need test doubles,

28:32

you just are actually testing real logic,

28:34

these are the kinds of unit tests

28:36

that everyone likes to write.

28:38

And it's sorta like functional programming

28:39

for people who wanna think too hard

28:41

about functional programming.

28:43

It makes it very accessible

28:44

because you can still do it in Ruby,

28:46

you don't have to change languages or something.

28:49

On the left are my values, and value objects,

28:52

they just wrap a little bit of data,

28:54

maybe they just hold onto a hash or an array,

28:57

and the methods on them are only allowed

28:58

to elucidate the data and answer questions about the data,

29:01

as opposed to doing feature work,

29:03

they're not there to actually build features.

29:05

Instead I think of them as the sludge

29:07

that flows though the pipes of my feature code,

29:09

they're the types in those method signatures.

29:13

And even if all this abstraction doesn't ultimately pay off,

29:16

and even if that feature doesn't change a lot in the future,

29:19

the very worst case, I've got a very discoverable system

29:21

of carefully named things that are obvious,

29:23

and small and comprehensible,

29:25

so it's not the worst outcome in the world.

29:29

The third aspect here is that I distrust myself,

29:33

even more than all of you.

29:35

It's because I worry about the future,

29:37

and even though I'm not super confident

29:38

in Today Me's skills, I'm even more worried

29:41

that my future self won't be able to program either

29:44

for some reason.

29:45

And so when I'm writing a feature,

29:46

somebody says, build this thing,

29:48

I'll think about how to build it,

29:49

and then I'll build a message in a bottle for myself

29:51

in the form of better tests and documentation

29:54

and commit messages, things to try to help.

29:57

And my future self, who's wearing sunglasses,

29:59

is told to change that feature, he gets really frustrated,

30:02

because what those tests mean is

30:04

now he's got a bunch of other stuff to do

30:05

every time he wants to make a change,

30:08

and my future self would much rather just start fresh

30:10

and be able to write new code.

30:12

And so I kept trying to do myself favors

30:15

by writing a lot of extra tests,

30:17

and adding in all this quality at the beginning,

30:19

but it would actually tie my hands,

30:21

and so I had to reflect how do I bake quality

30:23

into my applications without creating an undue burden

30:27

for my future self,

30:29

and so I started working a little bit differently.

30:31

Because if this is our tree of functionality

30:32

and our manager comes in and says, new requirement,

30:35

thanks to some HR fiasco all handshakes have to happen

30:38

between three people...

30:40

(audience chuckling)

30:42

the traditional way to solve this

30:43

is to carefully read the existing code,

30:46

add, remove, change tests, change the code,

30:49

and then try to make as small of a mess as possible,

30:52

and I say small mess because any time the purpose

30:57

of a piece of code has been two things,

31:01

whenever we change a unit,

31:03

it carries with it technical debt,

31:05

it confuses the story of why it existed

31:08

because it's changed over time.

31:10

So instead I've been trying to make my code disposable,

31:13

and what that means is that when I look at this tree,

31:17

I search for all of the affected units by the change,

31:19

these are two units that are gonna change,

31:22

and so then I find the smallest sub-tree

31:23

that encapsulates that change,

31:25

and so there it is right there.

31:26

And then I do something unusual, I blow it all up,

31:30

I just knock it out, 'cause I trust that my future self

31:32

is gonna be able to see that top level thing

31:34

and understand what the contract is.

31:37

So there he is, he's gonna drive out a new solution.

31:40

And as opposed to just changing these old units

31:42

that implemented the logic the old way

31:44

and thus wrack up technical debt,

31:46

instead I trust him to drive out a new solution.

31:48

And in fact, future us is gonna have more experience

31:52

than present-day us,

31:53

they'll probably have a better understanding

31:54

of the business, they'll be able to write better units

31:57

in the future than we ever could hope to today,

32:00

so this is a healthy way to work.

32:02

It does mean that I try not to reuse code too much

32:04

in my feature code because any code reuse,

32:06

like if you have a method that's called in nine places,

32:09

it's really hard to change that method,

32:10

'cause you have to consider nine different placed callers

32:13

and what they need.

32:14

It's also really hard to throw it away and replace it,

32:17

so I try not to reuse too much code.

32:19

And it also forced me to let go of this idea

32:21

that maintainable code has to live forever.

32:23

In fact, as opposed to that, this incremental,

32:28

rewriting the small as part of your process,

32:30

is a way to pay technical debt

32:32

without saving a rainy day fund

32:34

for when you finally get to refactor.

32:36

And in doing that, I actually made myself happier,

32:40

'cause future me does not want his job to be

32:43

fixing all of Justin's old janky tests

32:45

every time that he changes something.

32:48

It wants to be able to write code for a living,

32:50

and so this process by making death a part of life

32:54

while we're working through features,

32:55

is a great way to keep your teams happy I've found.

32:59

The last bucket here is Economical versus Thorough.

33:02

The question one, better to ship code quickly

33:05

than wait until everything is tested.

33:07

Eh, I feel like I'd just be bailing out water in that case.

33:11

Two, design principles are useful,

33:12

but most teams waste too much time on them.

33:14

It's possible for sure, but few teams are at risk of this.

33:19

Three, most teams lack a sufficient understanding

33:21

of their dependencies.

33:23

Absolutely, 90% of us have no clue

33:26

how most of our code works in our applications.

33:29

And four, it's okay for everyone on a team

33:31

to maintain separate coding styles.

33:33

I actually strongly disagree,

33:34

'cause this leads to siloed development,

33:36

it's kinda like a Conway's Law of style.

33:39

So does that make me Economical or Thorough?

33:41

Well of course it makes me Thorough.

33:43

Some of you are noticing that this spells salt,

33:47

(audience laughing)

33:49

that's because when you make up the quiz

33:50

you can make it spell whatever you want.

33:52

(audience laughing)

33:55

It's gonna surprise a few of you to learn today,

33:56

I have a confession to make,

33:57

I'm a bit of a control freak,

34:00

and that means I'm dubious of free stuff.

34:03

So when you see a sign that says free puppies,

34:05

all I read is extra work, and another thing

34:09

in our industry that makes me think extra work

34:11

is open source.

34:13

And so just keep that in your head

34:15

next time you're on GitHub asking for free labor

34:18

from an open source maintainer,

34:19

imagine you're yelling at a puppy instead,

34:21

because who yells at puppies, you jerk.

34:24

(audience laughing)

34:27

And open source isn't free because just like puppies

34:29

we have to learn how to use it,

34:31

we have to learn how it's changing and follow it,

34:33

and it's not just this panacea

34:37

that we can pull off the internet

34:39

instead of having to build stuff ourselves.

34:42

And if that open source has a bug,

34:45

in theory sure, we can fix it ourselves,

34:47

but in practice we're not gonna understand all that stuff,

34:49

we're probably gonna have to rely on a maintainer

34:51

or an expert to come and fix it later.

34:54

And finally, if we have a,

34:56

let's say this is our graph of objects,

34:58

and it's all very consistent everywhere,

35:01

and we slam in some third party API,

35:03

that's gonna create a certain amount of friction and pain

35:06

because it's going to look like all of our other objects.

35:08

In fact, third part dependencies

35:10

have this really nasty habit of leaking references

35:13

all over our code base, which makes it really hard to change

35:16

or replace or upgrade those third part dependencies

35:19

over time.

35:21

So my temptation of all these negative things

35:23

about open source and puppies, is to,

35:25

well I don't have a puppy first of all,

35:27

again, much to my wife Becky's consternation,

35:30

but two, I try to avoid using open source.

35:33

That's what my gut tells me to do,

35:35

but that's increasingly untenable these days

35:38

'cause I'd be reinventing wheels constantly.

35:40

So I had to change how I thought about open source instead

35:42

to maybe protecting myself from its blast radius,

35:46

as opposed to avoiding it entirely.

35:48

And the way that I do that is I write wrappers

35:50

of all of the third party code that I write.

35:52

In fact we already have one up on this tree,

35:53

it's that Finds Hands unit on the left.

35:56

So this is a wrapper object,

35:57

and it starts as just a well-named delegator,

35:59

it's a no-op, it doesn't do anything interesting.

36:02

But it comes to encode all of our understanding

36:04

of that dependency, it is the carpet under which we sweep

36:07

all of the stuff that we have to do

36:08

to make that third party dependency happy.

36:11

And I integration test it

36:12

but only in proportion to how suspicious I am

36:14

of it breaking, otherwise I trust

36:15

that it itself is tested well.

36:18

And it might feel like needless indirection,

36:20

but I need you to trust me that it's not.

36:22

Of course, if this is where we're calling Finds Hands

36:25

in our top level code,

36:27

and I just told you not to trust other developers,

36:29

so you don't trust me,

36:31

you assume that that wrapper is unnecessary let's say,

36:33

and instead of using that call

36:35

we're just gonna call it User.all instead.

36:37

That way it's much more direct,

36:38

we got rid of that needless indirection,

36:40

which means we have to update our test.

36:42

So this is our original test,

36:44

we can get rid of that fake finder

36:45

and instead have an array of real users

36:48

that we create in the database.

36:49

Of course, validation failed,

36:51

so now I have to add a birthdate,

36:53

some incidental other arbitrary thing

36:55

to make this work.

36:57

But I can also get rid of this stubbing here

37:00

and pass real users into the other stubbing,

37:02

and I gotta make an integration test

37:04

as opposed to a unit test.

37:05

And ask yourself now, what did we just do,

37:09

'cause the value of this test used to be crystal clear,

37:11

its purpose was to break the work up

37:13

into four clear responsibilities,

37:15

and now what is it?

37:17

It's calling through to the database

37:18

so it's making sure that the thing works,

37:20

but only when three quarters of the code pads are fake?

37:23

That doesn't seem right, that seems wrong to me,

37:26

and it really becomes obviously wrong

37:29

when this becomes more complex,

37:30

'cause if we add a couple scopes

37:32

like only search for full time and active employees,

37:35

then our test isn't enough anymore,

37:37

'cause those scopes are like branches,

37:39

so now we need two or three test cases to cover everything.

37:42

And now it's abundantly obvious

37:44

that we sliced things wrong.

37:46

So when I hear teams complain you have too many abstractions

37:49

or too many objects, typically I think that's,

37:52

it's not wrong, it's not that you're making

37:55

too many abstractions so that no abstraction

37:57

is somehow better,

37:58

it's that you're probably mixing

37:59

the levels of abstraction in your system,

38:01

because life with wrappers is much easier.

38:04

If I look at that same thing

38:05

and dive into what that wrapper looks like,

38:07

yes, on day one, in looks like needless indirection,

38:09

but on day two when it gets more complex,

38:13

it's easy to write a test for this,

38:15

there's a place for that complexity to go.

38:17

And over time it might become a little bit more complicated

38:19

as you distance yourself further here

38:21

with a transformer to a type that you own,

38:24

as opposed to an ActiveRecord user.

38:29

So let's say our boss comes in and says

38:31

we're gonna change from ActiveRecord to the Sequel gem.

38:34

Traditionally this would really panic

38:36

everyone in the room because you're gonna have

38:38

a billion references to ActiveRecord

38:39

all over your system,

38:41

but when you're writing wrappers carefully

38:42

of your third party dependencies,

38:44

you're actually preparing for yourself

38:47

an adapter interface that's minimal

38:49

and specifies exactly how you use that dependency.

38:51

So you can even answer questions like

38:53

would it be possible to switch to this third party thing?

38:55

And if you did, you could create an alternate implementation

38:57

and run both in parallel for awhile.

38:59

It's a much, much better way to work,

39:01

and what I found is it's a way to maintain,

39:04

still have all that convenience of open source

39:06

and sucking in these useful libraries

39:08

while maintaining control over how you work.

39:12

So when you're as introspective about this stuff as I am

39:16

you run the risk of explaining the universe

39:18

through yourself.

39:20

In fact if you ask anyone who's ever worked

39:22

on a project with me what my favorite way to write code is,

39:25

it's my way, and I'll fight you for it.

39:30

So my inclination is to just work really hard

39:32

to convince you all that my way is best,

39:34

and I'd love to say that that's an altruistic thing

39:36

and I want you all to be better programmers,

39:38

but it's not, it's selfish.

39:40

What it really is is I'm afraid

39:41

I'm gonna have a manager someday

39:43

tell me that I can't write code my favorite way anymore.

39:47

And when I reflect on that,

39:48

even if I were to come up with a perfect way to write code

39:51

and hand it to you, I run the risk of robbing you

39:54

of that same autonomy, and so that wouldn't be good either,

39:57

and so that's why I'm getting out

39:59

of the silver bullet business.

40:00

So even though I talked a lot today

40:02

about how I program, I'm not here to sell you on that,

40:06

I mean I hope you find some of it useful,

40:07

but what I really am here to sell you on

40:09

is the idea of pausing an introspecting

40:11

about how you act, feel, and think while you're programming

40:15

so that it becomes more explicable to you,

40:17

and then you could articulate it to other people,

40:19

and improve, and share.

40:21

And you might ask yourself, hey,

40:22

if we all start thoughtleading ourselves,

40:24

won't that just create chaos on our teams?

40:26

And I think that's actually a valid concern,

40:29

so let's spend a minute to talk about that.

40:31

Because earlier I said if you lock down

40:33

all those arbitrary decisions up front

40:35

you can spend more time being productive,

40:37

that's true individually, but it's also true as teams,

40:39

and that's why when you have disagreements

40:41

with other people on a team,

40:42

you should aggressively pull this forward,

40:44

because the earlier you have that discussion

40:46

and say okay, we'll use these semicolons,

40:49

or we'll follow this style,

40:50

if you can agree to that stuff early and lock it in,

40:52

you'll as a team be more productive,

40:54

and in fact if you look at the average team,

40:56

remember what I said earlier,

40:57

we're all just imitating other programmers,

41:00

so most teams actually like the idea of normalizing.

41:03

In fact, some of them like it too much,

41:05

where if you have a creative idea

41:07

of doing things differently,

41:08

oh, I don't wanna rock the boat,

41:10

I don't wanna do my own thing off here,

41:13

or go off the reservation, quote unquote,

41:15

so instead we tend to just gravitate

41:18

towards the lowest common denominator on a lotta teams,

41:20

and that's not good.

41:22

But that's not you anymore right,

41:23

'cause after today you're gonna be thinking

41:26

about how the actions you take could be improved,

41:29

your feelings, improving your thought processes,

41:32

and on your next team when you join a team

41:34

of all enlightened Hugh Jackmans,

41:36

(audience chuckling)

41:37

some of whom will be SALT,

41:39

and some of whom will be FINE,

41:40

which is literally what the other four traits spell.

41:42

(audience laughing)

41:45

And some will be SALE and some will be FALT,

41:47

when you look at this team, yeah sure,

41:49

they all have very strongly held opinions

41:51

of different ways of doing things,

41:53

but the one thing they have in common

41:54

is when they're approached with a new idea,

41:56

they have a system for testing it

42:00

and figuring out whether to adopt or reject it,

42:02

and so they're not afraid of trying new things.

42:05

And that's why I think that really introspected developers,

42:07

when they're on a team, they might just look like

42:09

they're talking at the whiteboard all day,

42:10

but they can actually have a multiplicative impact

42:12

on each other as they grow.

42:14

And that's really my dream today,

42:16

is that if we can, as an industry, normalize the concept

42:20

of metacognition, and self-improvement,

42:23

so that we can explain how to program

42:25

this whole place might start making a whole lot more sense.

42:31

And that is how to program.

42:33

(audience chuckling)

42:35

So I appreciate your time here today,

42:38

if you're looking for a company to work with

42:41

that's gonna support you on this kind of journey,

42:43

I hope you'd consider checking us out,

42:45

that's our page explaining what it's like

42:46

to work with us at Test Double,

42:48

and if you're a company that is looking

42:50

for additional developers on your team,

42:52

I hope you'd consider working with us.

42:53

We join other teams just as additional developers

42:57

with an interest in helping everyone get better as we go,

43:01

and you can learn more about us on our site.

43:04

By the way, I really made this quiz, it's a real thing,

43:06

I actually printed out 100 copies and I have it in my bag

43:10

so you can get a special commemorative edition today,

43:12

if you come up and say hi to me I'll hand you one,

43:14

I also have a lotta Test Double stickers.

43:17

If you don't wanna say hi to me in person

43:19

you an actually go to testdouble.com/salt

43:22

and fill it out, we made a Google Form,

43:24

and then two of our agents yesterday actually

43:27

figured out how to automate Google Form

43:28

so it'll calculate your programmer type

43:32

and email you right away,

43:33

so I hope you go check that out too.

43:35

But most importantly of all,

43:37

I'm really thankful for this opportunity

43:38

and for your time this morning.

43:40

Thank you.

43:41

(audience applauding)