Keynote: Stopping to Sharpen Your Tools
@brandon_rhodes
PyWaw Summit 2015
Warszawa
“Education consists of learning
specific skills (including how to learn)
and also acquiring attitudes.”
— J. Elmer Rhodes
He wrote about Mama
Note
His English grandmother
“I was very small when she
began to teach me to use tools,
- “hammer (with a cracked handle)
- handsaw (I learned years later
that it was woefully dull) - monkey wrench
- Stilson wrench
- screwdriver
- dull hatchet”
Note
If your tools are faulty, then unless you can tell, you will often just blame yourself
Are your tools dull?
Are your tools dull?
How would you know?
I ran an amateur astronomy
sprint at PyCon 2015
Helping one of my attendees, I held
down Backspace to erase a line
The wait for it to
reach the beginning of
the line was terrible
Key repeat rate is a
very personal decision
Key repeat rate is a
very personal decision
but
Note
I asked permission to adjust it just for the day
Result
Win
Hypothesis
Many novice programmers
have no gauge on whether their
tools are wasting their time
- Co-workers
- Conferences
- Pair programming
- Watching screencasts
Q:
How quickly and accurately
can you switch windows?
Note
Hypothesis — are IDEs popular because OS’s make it so hard to switch windows?
Q:
Can you indent and dedent code
without separately adjusting each line?
Q:
Does your editor run
pyflakes and flag errors
before you even run the code?
Q:
Can you automate repetitive
editing tasks with macros
or multiple cursors?
Q:
Do you use version control?
Q:
Can you use the Tab key for
both navigation and completion
Q:
Do you know the most
important 8 keystrokes for
editing with readline?
- Bash
- Zsh
- Emacs
- Python!
Previous / Next line Ctrl-P ↑↓ Ctrl-N
Back / Forward char Ctrl-B ←→ Ctrl-F
Back / Forward word Alt-B ←→ Alt-F
Beginning / End of line Ctrl-A ←→ Ctrl-E
Q:
Do you use interactive search?
Ctrl-R
↑
↓
Ctrl-S
Watching a skilled programmer
use basic tools can help you learn
which operations are supposed
to be simple and what is
supposed to be hard!
Konstantin Levin in
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin
Note
(pronounced “Lay-vin”)
“being made very angry by the bailiff
he had recourse to his favourite means for
regaining his temper,—he took a scythe
from a peasant and began mowing.”
“He felt as he swung his scythe that
he was at the very end of his strength…
But at that very moment [the peasant]
stopped of his own accord—
“—and stooping
down picked up some
grass, rubbed his scythe,
and began whetting it.”
mow
scythe
whet
Note
You can tell what was important to the English by how they allocated monosyllables.
You will not mow effectively
if you pay attention only
to the work—the grass
Mowing a field involves
alternating your attention between
the grass and the scythe
All work involves
a rhythm — a balance —
between focus on the work
and focus on your tools
Q:
When is it time
to switch focus?
Transactions of the AMS, 1923
Transactions of the AMS, 1974
“At this point I regretfully
stopped submitting papers to the
American Mathematical Society, since
the finished product was just too
painful for me to look at.”
— Donald Knuth
In one of the more epic examples
of stopping to sharpen your scythe,
Donald Knuth took a year off to
- Create the Metafont language for fonts
- Design and render his own typefaces
- Invent the TEX typesetting language
Note
He reasoned that it was better to spend a year writing new tools than to try to get good results out of the old one.
Another famous example: Python!
“I realized that the development
of system administration utilities
in C was taking too long”
— Guido van Rossum,
“History of Python part 1”
Python saved time
It eliminated repetitive tasks
like hand-written memory allocation,
without suffering from the wats of
traditional scripting languages!
Programmer productivity
Programmer productivity
is measured in
wat-1 hr-1
Remember yesterday’s talk
on going down Rabbit Hole?
Django Forms
Django Forms
Wats — all the way down?
TEX
Python
Those are expert moves
What about the rest of us?
Home Directory
- Version control!
- Save shell’s dot files
- Collect your own commands
Note
See my own home directory with ,home switch
Watch demonstrations
I had heard of the IPython Notebook,
but it was seeing Fernando’s 2013 PyCon
Canada keynote that made me use it!
Most novice programmers
hack away slowly at their
work with dull tools
But could there be an
equal and opposite error?
Dr. Dan Rocco showed me the book
The Seven Essentials of Woodworking
by Anthony Guidice
“Too many woodworkers thinker
and experiment with tools … and
avoid applying their skills
in the real world.”
Confession
I once disappeared into my tools
What should govern
the investment in tools
that we make with our time?
- Repetition
- Traction
Repetition
Programmer, jit thyself!
Repetition
Programmer, jit thyself!
Boredom is a key skill
Traction
As long as you are making
progress, keep coding
Traction
If it feels like I am flailing and
making random changes to code
then I stop to work on my tools
But, traction
can be dangerous —
it can pull me in the direction
of less important problems
if they inspire less fear
Two solutions
- Fight your emotions
- Develop more traction
Traction
Practice creating traction
so that you decide direction,
instead of your tools and fears
setting your direction for you
Examples
What tools have I adopted recently
in response to repetition and
problems with traction?
pydoc
Jedi
ag
Magit
Note
Users complained online about the diff format. It took me one day, and I could read it fine.
My next tweak?
Tooling
lifelong process
Can take months or years
to notice a pattern and learn
how to automate it away
Q:
Which is the most important
instrument to keep sharp?
A:
Yourself
Ola, talk yesterday
“Are you hungry? Thirsty?
Set a timer. Plan a break.”
self-awareness
Note
My mood is often completely changed, when blundering around the kitchen at night, from simply turning on enough light.
You don’t merely need
to be aware of your tools
You need to be aware of yourself
Note
So, why did I quote that passage from Tolstoy?
“being made very angry by the bailiff
he had recourse to his favourite means for
regaining his temper,—he took a scythe
from a peasant and began mowing.”
Remember what drew my attention
to the key-repeat rate at the sprint?
Remember what drew my attention
to the key-repeat rate at the sprint?
My frustration
Thank You! — @brandon_rhodes
Images — Peasant by Jan Piotr Norblin;
Time of harvesting (Mowers)
by Grigoriy Myasoyedov