Top 3: 31 lesson on 10,000 hrs of programming, futurama and the greatest skill one can develop

Hello my friends.

Here's what I picked this week, enjoy!

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​1. Reflections on 10,000 Hours of Programming​

TL;DR: 31 lessons after 10,000 hours of programming.

Here are the most useful and interesting ones:

• Simple is hard.
• Browsing the source is almost always faster than finding an answer on StackOverflow.
• Delete as much code as you can.
• Syntactic sugar is usually bad.
• If it looks ugly, it is most likely a terrible mistake.
• Good APIs are easy to use and hard to misuse.

I noticed that almost all such "X lessons after Y years" contain advice about reducing complexity. And I myself have been convinced many times how "complex code", "complex variable naming", "complex logic" killed efficiency.

I have a hypothesis that by working with complex things, we can do fewer tasks than by working with simple things. Because more cognitive resources of the brain are expended, and the amount per day is limited.

Complex things are:

• large code constructs
• large and poorly defined abstractions
• poorly named variables which require reading dozens of lines of code to understand what they store

This theory is supported by researches on the effect of task complexity on motor and cognitive activity of the brain, as well as by pure logic.

So if you were to ask me how to improve development efficiency, I would say: reduce complexity.

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2. 10 Progressive Organizational Structures Developed By Real Companies​

TL;DR: An overview of ten different organizational structures.

The interesting thing is that almost all organizational structures other than traditional, hierarchical ones are dead. Except Spotify model that still works, although it is not clear how effective it is and how to measure it.

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3. If Programming Languages Were Futurama Characters​

TL;DR: What programming languages would look like if they were characters from Futurama.

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🦚 Tweet of the week

DAN KOE @thedankoe The greatest skill one can develop is decreasing the time between idea and execution. May 5th 2022 1,998 Retweets 8,456 Likes

Lifehack from me.

In the past, before doing a task that I did not want to do, I unconsciously made a todo list where I described in detail all that is needed to perform the task. It was a kind of procrastination and had little success.

But then I found a framework (I don't remember the name) and began to do things differently.

The idea is to find just one action that will bring the most results and do it immediately. Very very simple and very very effective 🔥

That's all for this week, take care and have a great one!

– Nick
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