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ReadingAndWritingPreferencesSee: SelfRejuvenation and HowDoWeLearn --BobLee 2002.06.18 ...Finally, and perhaps most important, I leave my world entirely and read fiction. I'm currently working on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. When I return, my world seems new and different. MikeMelendez 020607 ...Books bring me joy. When I'm stressed I go to the bookstores and just browse through books. I buy the ones that really stand out and they are added the pile of other books that I'm reading. There is just something about going to a bookstore that helps me connect to something bigger than myself. For me, it's a lot like walking in the woods. There is lots to see and learn. SteveSmith 2002.06.07 Writing for work drains me, writing fiction revializes me. Talking usually reviatlizes me when I've been "in my head" doing analysis or drudge work. Reading fiction revitalizes me, reading non-fiction drains me. Hmm, maybe I like the dialogue in the fiction, interaction between characters, like I'm there, and it helps my "E" get what it needs even when alone. ...-- MarieBenesh 2002.06.17 I'm an INFP / INTP [only INFP since '99.] Like Steve, I enjoy just soaking in the feeling of books in a big bookstore or in a library I haven't used up yet. I love having about 5-15 tech or reference books in various stages of reading or examination. I like any kind of book that connects for me. I don't have to read it cover-to-cover, but catch some ideas and remember where to find it later if I want to expand my knowledge. I've given up on trying to memorize books --- I overflowed too long ago. In writing, I work by inertia: hard to get started, then hard to stop. I enjoy it when I can share something that grows the overall wealth of ideas. It's also fun to pass on collected ideas and tips. I like written networking a lot! Lets me have time to reflect where real-time speech leaves me playing catch-up ball. I've trained myself to be better at real-time speech, but I don't believe it will ever be my first choice. --BobLee 2002.06.18 I'd like to clarify my response about non-fiction. Technical books drain me, books that focus on personal or interpersonal issues either revitalize or are neutral. Examples of interpersonal books: Secrets of Consulting; The Artist's Way; The Invitation; The Art of Possibility. In writing, I have no idea how it works. Sometimes I sit down and bam, it's happening and I have too much to say. Other times I'll sit down and take an hour to craft one paragraph, then still not be happy with it. I'm better first thing in the morning before everyone else's thoughts intrude on mine. MarieBenesh 2002.06.19 I find that only poorly-written books drain me, regardless of type. Most technical books are badly written, so it's not surprising Marie, that technical books drain you! JohannaRothman 2002.06.20 Mike ... Oh, To have JUST started the Nero Wolfe series! I have read these a while back - all of them and some more than once. My current orchid collection owes a bit to Rex Stout and Nero. I feel a strong affinity between detective and system analyst (my profession) methods. Many detective writers have been read and sit on my shelf. A zillion between Sherlock's stories to "Get Shortie", they all have a place. Don't we all unravel mysteries!?? I find the books that drain me are ones which fail to develop characters or a compelling story. (Why are we here?). - BeckyWinant 2002.06.24 People make books "real". Nero Wolfe interacting with Archie Goodwin. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. To me, the mysteries are secondary but must be solved. Rex Stout throws in numerous twists and turns. Frequently, the real mystery doesn't get introduced til halfway through the book. All of which draws me in. Most important, I'm an observer. The situation is safe. And I can learn, weighing a fictional world against my own world, where dangers do exist. The Real World (no apologies to MTV) and fiction do have one major difference. In the real world, mysteries are frequently not solved. But in the end, it's always about the people. -- MikeMelendez 2002.06.26 (Has Tony Hillerman published another Dine mystery yet?) Mike, Perhaps because we often fail to solve myteries in the real world, mysteries and thrillers draw us in because we find that balance of problem -> solution. I agree that in the end it is about people, I think that is why I look for character development. Hemingway is okay if you want to play with the effect of words and sequences of words, but many of his characters are very shadowy or one-dimensional - particularly the women. Don't know if Hillerman has a new book out. Luckily I am still behind enough there to be able to pick up something I've not read. - BeckyWinant 2002.06.26 I think one of the attractions of fiction is how books simplify the messy model so you only have to watch a small cast of characters. You generally know who is significant by how well described they are. Lots more clues than in the real world! Of course, some authors have caught on to that and reacted to muddy the waters, but on the whole, books are a nicely simplified model in cause & effect. Rarely do books present a story that spreads out throughout the society - ecologically everything affecting everything. They let us focus the problem solving on a contained cast of characters. [Or at least mysteries & sci-fi that I read usually work that way.] --BobLee 2002.06.27 Bob, Yes, you have a point about the simpler or at least clearly-focused world. Although I have had moments in the supermarket where I have nearly walked right past a neighbor because my focus was scanning the shelf. Books can be a great escape. Do movies do the same thing for you? - BeckyWinant 2002.06.27 Hmmm ... "reality" and focusing on the "world" appear to me to be just as much an escape. --NynkeFokma June 29, 2002 Yes, I agree with Nynke. The only non-escape activity is posting words on the AYE wiki - and going to the conference, of course. - JerryWeinberg 2002.06.29 Reading books to acquire knowledge is so easy for me that I have hard time dealing with people who find reading books difficult. I'd like to be able to give someone on my programming team a book and say "I want us to do Test-Driven-Programming, here's good book on TDD (pay attention to chapter 37)" and then they become able to do TDD. Unfortunately, that is not the case. They don't read the books. And since they are not native English speakers, I can understand some reluctance and difficulty involved. I've also tried teaching TDD during pair programming, and now I think I'll have to teach a 'formal' class on it -- in a classroom with computers set up and I give them lots sample problems to practice TDD on. --KeithRay Keith, Elisabeth Hendrickson has experience with both classes on testing and on managing software risks. The games played and exercises done in her workshops probably make a better point than any book (or words) can do. And, IMHO, Elisabeth can be as sharp as a biker's buck knife when she is in problem solvers mode. Maybe she can and is willing to give you a couple of (re)useful pointers for designing your workshop. --NynkeFokma, June 30, 2002 Once again, I agree with Nynke. Elisabeth and I are writing a book together on the psychology of software testing. Elisabeth can't come to AYE this year (a conflict), but we're both collecting stories about testing mentality. Keith's observation about non-readers is something I want to pursue. - JerryWeinberg 2002.06.30 For Keith: There are non-readers, and there are people who don't want to read what you might want to recommend. I love to read, but please, no TDD for me <grin>. However, you are talking about your team, and how you want them to do something you think is important. You've just hit the 'change' button. You may want to do something first that makes them want to do what you've suggested. You may have just been shortening the story to fit here, but you may also not have given people time and motivation to learn what you've asked. - MarieBenesh 2002.06.30 Becky asked, "Do movies do the same thing for you?" I had to think for a bit. I have to say no. I rarely watch movies. Several times when I watched a movie made of a book I had read, I felt quite disappointed. I think it goes elsewhere, though. I'm a visual pictures learner, and movies are so non-interactive I get frustrated. I also recall them graphically - I can replay too many scenes in my head. I think I don't like to commit that many gigabytes to pictures unless I'm really going to want to remember them. I'm the same way about photos - never cared to take any. I find it too easy to access the wetware photo store to bother with cumbersome physical photos. I know I'm wierd, but is this unique? --BobLee 2002.07.03 Bob, you aren't odd at all (and I hardly know you!). I also have been disappointed at movies made from books - with only two exceptions. I like Catch-22 (different from the book, but still quite good) and The Godfather (pretty equal to the book). Movies that are formed from the clay of light and motion and characters brought to life can be really quite wonderful . I am not a dedicated movie goer, but certain movies are enchanting. The are escapes and they ring inside my head for a long time. Chocolat was such a movie, to name just one. Like you I am a visual pictures learner. I bet you and I share a common learning experience: I draw notes and capture key words and then find that I don't need to refer to them to know what the lesson was. (That being said...my memory has elected to eject certain lessons until it can sync them up with the kinesthetic of experience :) -BeckyWinant 2002.07/03 Keith, what kind of culture do the people on your team come from? For instance, I learned that in Japan people expect to sit in formal classes and do not ask questions. Not questioning authority is a form of respect. While I have found certain books compelling and interesting, I sometimes ask myself "so now what?". I'm sure that you understand what I'm talking about. Have you considered a mentoring program might support the TDD specifics you want people to learn? I've had clients who have had great success with brown bag lunch discussions to explore topics, techniques and experiences. One colleague and I have made a pact that all of our interesting discussions should be accompanied by good food. (I suspect this comes from his European background, as many Americans seem happy enough with "fast" food). You might enjoy an article on http://www.norvig.com called "Teaching Yourself to Program in Ten Years". Peter Norvig is (among other things) the author of the powerpoint presentation of the Gettysburg address that is referred to in the thread WhyWeDoNotUsePowerPoint. - BeckyWinant 2002.07.03 I've been reading Norvig's stuff today. Note that the second and third code snippets here ( http://www.norvig.com/java-iaq.html#null ) represent two refactorings: Extract Method (to reduce code duplication) and Replace Conditional With Polymorphism. While "NullObject" idioms are rather trivial, this is an example of the kind of object oriented thinking I'm trying to get my team to do -- they would do the first refactoring, but they would not go that extra step that builds OO abstractions... I'm doing a lot of refactoring now to clean up the design. (Refactoring is an essential step in TDD.) Talking with my team, it seems that their resistance to TestDrivenDevelopment comes mostly from the feeling that they don't have time to do this new way of working... there's a lot of (perceived) time-pressure at my office. Now they've been moved to another project, which is in its 'final' stages and never had any unit tests, so they're not likely to do any automated testing (first or after) now. When they come back to my projects, testing will again be required... I'm getting amazingly little interest in having brown bags at my office. I once tried to get permission to host Allan Shalloway, who was looking for sites to do free lectures about refactoring and design patterns, but couldn't find a manager interested in it. I have been asked to give a presentation about XP to a department that mostly does image processing code, but besides my work-load, I'm a bit depressed by our lack of culture change... by doing only about 80% of XP's practices-- "the easy ones" -- we reap only 40% of its benefits (some consultants say it is 80/20). That department probably isn't that interested in XP, and might not benefit that much from doing it -- image processing is one area where test-first doesn't seem to help much (though regression tests help a lot). (See HowDoWeLearn) As for relaxing reading... Jane and I read Hillerman mysteries, fantasy (Terry Pratchett rocks!), and science fiction (David Brin rules!). We've almost run out of Hillerman books. :-( Jane wants to visit that Indian country, but I'd rather read about desert situations than actually be out there sweating in one. KeithRay 2002.07.04 Jerry - your book with Elizabeth on SW testing... are you going to cover TestDrivenDevelopment at all? It is quite different from what most people do. KeithRay 2002.07.04 I would certainly hope so. In many ways, test driven development is a return to what we did in times long past, when there were no people designated as "testers." We developers had to test our own code, and some of us, at least, always started by designing tests as a way of stating requirements. We would show these tests to customers and ask, "If you got this, what would you think?" Of course, we also made tests of internal stuff that they wouldn't see, but in general, we couldn't afford to hack at code. Turnaround times were too long (a week or more, in some cases). We had to think through our tests and also do a lot of reviewing, of designs, code, and tests. We had a standard that if a piece of code had to be run more than twice to pass all its tests, it was subjected to a team review to see what was going wrong before we just fixed it and ran it again. We couldn't afford too many lost weeks of turnaround, and about 9 out of 10 times, our first run on a particular piece of code passed all its tests. Most of the other times, there was one fault. We seldom had two faults in the same piece of code. Anyway, I think this experience gives a useful data point when we consider varieties of SW testing. At the very least, it shows how flexible the whole process is, responding to various constraints. I've personally never gotten over those lessons, and I can't tolerate (for myself) the modern method of hacking away on my Mac until I get something that doesn't obviously fail. If I don't get it right the first time, I stop and give it some serious thought. - JerryWeinberg 2002.07.05 We developers had to test our own code, and some of us, at least, always started by designing tests as a way of stating requirements. Is this equivalent to writing requirements that are testable? - JohnSuzuki 2002.07.05 I believe so. That seems to be why I've always tested requirements against the testability standard - if you can't think of a way to test it, it's not a requirement. - JerryWeinberg 2002.07.06 Becky made a point that I almost missed: (That being said...my memory has elected to eject certain lessons until it can sync them up with the kinesthetic of experience :) I think I'm a look-ahead learner. I want to decide whether to commit stuff to storage, and want to validate the content to an extent before "swallowing". I'm not certain that I can really clean out discordant webs of stuff, but if I can, it must be uphill work. I like to scan the table of contents, jacket flap, bibliography to see where I'm heading. That frustrates me in a lecture - can't look ahead unless there's an agenda. Learning is hard but pleasant work - finding and connecting ideas. Trying to do that at real-time with disorganized material frustrates me. I need reflect time to clear my in-basket. --BobLee 2002.07.06 See HowDoWeLearn Bob, how can we get you to relax some of the time and just allow yourself to learn whatever you learn from a situation? - JerryWeinberg 2002.07.06 Why, Jerry, reading and writing relaxes me! Surely you're not expecting me to venture out into the hot, humid sunshine and vacuum gunk out of a swimming pool, are you? I might lose my hard-won pallor! --BobLee 2002.07.06 Ah, if only I could know before hand if something is worth learning before I learned it. That would be efficient, wouldn't it? Trouble is, I often don't know exactly what it is I need to learn until I have learned it and used it. And sometimes I learn really interesting things while I'm doing something "mindless" or just hanging around. Like road-tripping or walking or sitting on the patio watching my dog romp around the yard(I don't have a swimming pool, so I have to find substitutes). EstherDerby 07100 Esther, if you had a swimming pool up there in Minnesota, you could take up ice skating. (See, Fiona, you don't have to be North of the Border for me to make fun of your living habits.) - JerryWeinberg 2002.07.11 Well, depending on which house I'm in, I'm pretty dang close to the border. And Minnestans often think longingly of seceding and joining our northern neighbor when the other states vote in a disappointing way. EstherDerby 071202 Esther, you'd be very welcome indeed, but I'm afraid you'd have to learn how to spell neighbour first! (More than a writing preference; this one's a Cultural Norm.) Jerry, by that arcane reference I think you must mean skating, which is by definition an activity that takes place on ice. Anything else is roller skating or blading, an activity indulged in by persons suffering from ice-envy. -- FionaCharles 2002.07.12 Suffering from ice-envy: Fiona, you've clearly described Jerry to an [iced?] "T"! --BobLee (Suffering from swimming pool gunk and garden overgrowth) 2002.07.12
Updated: Friday, July 12, 2002 |
