managing your mental stack

The Fire Hose, Push and Pull

Sasha Rosenbaum, a consultant at 10th Magnitude who grew up in Ukraine and spent about 11 years in Israel before Chicago, joins Matty and Trevor to talk about how to decide what's worth learning and how to learn it. Matty's method for the fire hose of information is to let it in without filtering: "my ears are wide open, my eyes are wide open," everything rattles around unprocessed, and if something sticks he digs deeper. He says he misses 90% of anything on Twitter, and the interesting links go into Pocket for later. Sasha's fire hose is Flipboard, plus a little Facebook and LinkedIn and the occasional tip from a colleague. Trevor's starts with Reddit and the meetups he goes to, and then he takes what sticks to Google. Sasha's name for the pairing is "a pull request and a push request."

Matty found configuration management, now a big part of his job, through a small reference in the Continuous Delivery book. Trevor opens with a question the episode keeps circling: "How do you find the best balance between Renaissance man and specialist?"

Solve It, Then Write It Down

Trevor learns by doing and calls himself "very bad at conceptual learning." Matty agrees, and adds that books make it easy to overestimate what a tool can do, because you never had to make it "jump through a hoop." Sasha's version is that books describe the good stuff, and you only find the one thing a tool doesn't do once you're committed to it. Her plan, which she says she hasn't done yet, is to write a blog post after solving a problem, since "you learn, you solve, and then you teach." Trevor treats his posts as "a secondary memory file." Matty's SharePoint search post still gets traffic, which he says is "relevant to the internet, it's not relevant to me, thank God."

Sasha tells of a friend who handed her a PDF on an unfamiliar algorithm and asked her to say when she understood it. After five minutes she thought she did, and then she was asked to teach it and found she didn't. Trevor says the same thing happens when he explains one solution to five people: the first time he's still thinking it through, and by the last he thinks "I actually truly understand" the solution, which is also why he likes pair programming.

Podcasts Get Authoritative

Matty reads out a friend's line that listening to podcasts is "a terribly inefficient way of transferring actual information," like "asking Grandpa Simpson for directions." His own experience is split. An audio-only podcast on writing Rails code didn't work for him, but he absorbs concepts from Food Fight or DevOps Cafe better than from docs, and a line he heard there, that a role should be an alias of a run list, stuck because he can hear it in his head. He's caught himself quoting podcast guests to clients as though they were authoritative, and Trevor's answer is "why shouldn't it be?"

Sasha has a 40-minute bus ride each way, gets carsick trying to read, and found podcasts fill the time, though she wants to argue back and can't. She thinks of it as taking part in a discussion instead of passively consuming a lecture, and says it "feels like having a discussion with your friends about things you care about." Trevor has the failure mode: he was listening to the Ship Show and started to join the conversation, before realizing "this isn't live," and "there's not real people here right now except the actual people on the train."

Nobody Gives You a Training Day

Matty says the rare job gives you time to just go learn, and that conferences work for him as a way to make connections, not to learn: "I learn nothing at a conference directly." Trevor's office tries a weekly brown bag, but after a day of bashing his head against a problem he either keeps working or veges out, so he reads new material on the train in the morning before his brain is overloaded. Sasha says a weekend of planned learning never happens, and that "go learn some random thing" wouldn't work for her, while a proof of concept for a specific problem would have her working after hours.

Sasha's other tip is switching context: read about business or networking or neural pathways instead of more technology. Matty agrees and cites The Goal as reading on what your company is actually for. His own rule is about an hour a week on something outside his focus, like learning Ruby without any connection to Chef, and he then notes that DevOps hasn't come up until three-quarters of the way in. Trevor says they'd mentioned it "at least 4 times," and Matty says all of them were in the first three sentences.

A Little Bit of the Other Side

Sasha describes her first reaction when 10th Magnitude added infrastructure automation people: "I am a developer. I don't want to do infrastructure." It changed when Matty joined and they started talking about DevOps instead, which she found made "total sense" because she could get exposed to a little of the adjacent side, set up a CI or automate a delivery, and still have an expert to ask. Matty's own version is learning enough about development to know how to talk to developers.

Trevor says he leans toward being the Renaissance type because he finds both the developer problems and the ops problems fun. Matty points out that this sounds like every problem is fun to him, and Trevor agrees he can't name one he enjoys more. Sasha adds that a calculus problem would be another matter, and Trevor says "calculus can stay somewhere else."

Pocket, Tabs, and the Pomodoro Challenge

Matty's workflow starts with a quick triage while he's on a break: links from Twitter and Flowdock go to Pocket, which is "good, bad, good, bad," so he can do it standing on the L platform. When he has 20 or 30 minutes, he goes through Pocket and reads for real. Trevor leaves Reddit links open in tabs, and jokes that he reads them once a month on Tuesdays, conveniently right before the updates force the machine to restart. Matty's name for it is "Patch and Read Tuesdays."

Sasha brings up the Pomodoro technique, since her concentration only lasts about an hour and a half. She also summarizes an article on productivity whose first tips were to take more breaks and naps, and whose third was to spend more time in nature: "I'm going to go find a tree in Chicago and stand next to it." Trevor turns it into the episode's challenge, which is for listeners to try Pomodoro, and use the breaks to catch up on reading, and report back to @ArrestedDevOps.

• Matt's popular blog post - Configuring SharePoint 2010 Search in a one-way trust scenario
• Food Fight - Episode 36: Roles, Environments, Attributes, and Data Bags
• The Goal by Elliot Goldratt
• Flipboard
• Pocket
• Pomodoro
• Vitamin-R

Check-Outs

Matt

• Vagrant 1.5
• QuizUp

Trevor

• .NET Fiddle
• Air Disasters
• One-Wipe Charlies

Sasha

• Visual Studio Web Essentials 2013
• Self Promotion for Introverts
• The Little Prince