100 Awesome tech talks - 1: Ease at work - Kent beck

Ease at work - Kent Beck

What does ease mean?

• State of comfort
• Freedom from worry, pain or agitation
• Readiness in performance, facility

State of comfort

We need to have a sense when working that we are doing the right thing, that we are at the right place, that we are answering our calling.

Freedom from worry, pain or agitation

• anxiety is kryptonite for programmers
• if we are worrying, we are not doing our best work.
• we are anxious about deadlines, expectations
• we are worrying about technology, looking at new technology

Readiness in performance, facility

• We should not worry about things that dont matter
• care deeply about things that do matter.
• care deeply about our work -> be fulfilling some kind of purpose

What causes unease?

• We have to work on the sense of ease
• what is taking it away?, how to get it back?

Battle between two extremities

• We are swinging between two extreme states
• We are awesome, the best programmer in the world
• We are bad, the worst programmer
• We need to reduce the amplitude of these swings so that our self image is correlated with reality.
• We need to manage these extremes

How to be more at ease?

My work matters

• If we believe that our work does not matter, we are not at ease
• work that does not matter is a place of dis-ease
• Find purpose in different ways
  • Economic : sales go up, company is more valuable
  • Social impact

Knowing that the code works

• TDD - designs get better, more feedback, more documentation
  • I know that my code works.
  • fear is transmuted into boredom.
• Afraid of breaking something, causes unease

Pride

• be proud of your code.
• we can be proud of our code in different dimensions.
  • following best practices
  • writing clean code
  • taking a mess and cleaning it up
  • adding successfully to a mess
• when we are proud of our work, we are at ease

Make public commitments

• make public commitments about what you are going to do
• accountability -> without excuse, without blaming others
  • not blaming others
• we can fall short sometimes.
• when we can account for ourselves -> we are at ease
• schedule chicken -> everybody in the table knows you are not going to make the schedule

Interpret feedback

• interpret both positive and negative feedback.
• dont be carried away by both positive and negative feedback.

I am a beginner

• learning new things help us see the limits of our knowledge
• we get more feedback by deliberately putting ourselves in the mindset of a beginner

Meditate

• Meditation helps us with ease

Serve

• Deliberately doing things with no sense of reward.
• helping others

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval

• Mark Twain