Brain

How well do you know your brain? Do you know how it works? What areas it is really strong at, what areas it is weak and how to maximise its capabilities?

The human brain is one of the world's great wonders and we live in a age where we now know a tremendous amount of details on how it works.

You need understand how your brain work, so that you understand it's blind spots and why we behave in the way we do.

How do you think? How do you remember? How do you see? How rational are your decisions? Who is actually making the decisions in your head?

If you have not looked at this topic before, you will be very surprised with the answers to these questions.

As a developer your brain is your tool. What makes you special and different from other developers is your ability to create mental models, process information, codify your intentions and execute your ideas.

This is where you need to apply your logical and computing side of the brain and reverse engineer how your own brain works.

I've always found the brain fascinating and the more I learned about it, the better I become at understanding how I and others think.

A good place to start is the Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything book, which uses economic techniques to answer a number of very interesting questions.

The Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions takes that to another level, where it shows example after example how we are not rational at all in a number of decisions we make everyday

The best one I've read is Incognito - The Secret lives of the brain which not only explains really well how the brain works, it really challenges our understanding of how the brain works.

How I think

When self analysing how I think (from an engineering point of view), I found that I have two types of thinking techniques.

• A slow(ish) type of thinking - where I'm basically talking to myself in my head. This is also how I tend to read (I heard the text I'm reading in my head)
• A fast type of thinking - where I 'somehow' am making a large number of analysis and decisions, and 'know' what I'm thinking without really needing to articulate in my head all the explanations of what I'm doing. This is the kind of thinking that one tends to get when in 'the Zone' (which is that magical place where ideas 'just flow' and we are hyper productive)

The more time you can spend on the 2nd type the more productive you will be.

I've also found that although my brain is able to hold a large amount of hyperlinked information (creating a graph of linked data that I'm working on), it is not good at all at multi-tasking (i.e. working on multiple domain problems at the same time or performing a manual activity).

This is why is so important to be able to spend concentrated time on a particular topic, since it takes a while to upload all relevant data to the parts of the brain focused on the task at hand.

Switching context and interruptions

A reason why even a 1 second interruption can be massively disruptive (for example a text message, or slack/snapchat/instragram/facebook/twitter notification) is because it breaks the mojo of your brain and destroys a number of those hyperlinked graphs you had created in your head.

It is even worse when the interruption actually requires some extra activity (for example a question from somebody at the office).

One area that these interruptions happen a lot in the normal developer's coding workflow is Testing. The simple fact of having to manually run a test (either via the command line, or by clinking on a web browser), will break your mental models and make you 'switch context'

I can't explain (you need to experience it yourself) how productive is it to code in an environment where the context switching is minimal (which is what happens when coding using tools like wallbyjs or NCrunch)