Friday 9 September 2011

iOSDev UK: The Eternal Sunshine of the Developer Mind

Steve “Scotty” Scott, iDeveloper iDTV, @macdevnet

Scotty gave a great talk complete with loads of cartoons that I can’t remember here. I’ve just noted down the more serious bits…

However, the best slide was by far:

Pocket Dan - from @macdevnet's presentation at iOS Dev UK 2011

  • programming is:
    • 10% science
    • 20% ingenuity
    • 70% getting the two to work together
  • embrace your pain and draw positives from it
  • just because something has failed, doesn’t make you a failure
  • unless you can own the failure, you can’t understand the problem and move on
  • if you’re trying to learn what went wrong, make sure you’re looking at the real issues
    • keep on asking why until you hit the real reason
    • was it the people or the technology?
  • you don’t have time not to do this
  • when you next find a situation that’s negative, find a positive
  • make sure you learn to understand what people are saying, rather than what you are hearing
    • “developers get confused between Xmas & Halloween because DEC 25 = OCT 31”
  • it is impossible to mentor yourself
    • you can’t get out of your own assumptions
    • you don’t need someone highly experienced to mentor you — you just have to explain yourself and get someone to ask, “how do you know that’s true?”
  • often our thinking is shaped by a whole load of things that you haven’t let go
    • process it and let it go
  • we don’t tend to learn a lot from success
    • that’s ok - we just need to do the same thing again

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