Tragically L33T

NFJS – Fall 2009 – Day Three

Ah, the final day of No Fluff…

I spent the morning talking with Barbee Davis and Suzie Lewis Ship about topics ranging from science fiction to Agile development. As a result I missed Ken Sipe’s Iteration 0 panel.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers - Ken Sipe

Ken’s session is about applying the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey to software developers.

Covey’s seven habits are:

• be proactive
• begin with the end in mind
• put first things first
• seek first to understand, then to be understood
• synergize
• sharpen the saw

Ken referred to a blog post ”Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers”. The attributes from that post are:

• Humility
• Love of Learning
• Detail Orientedness
• Adaptability
• Passion

He has his own list:

• focused on a mission with a vision

• best researcher

• best debugger

• god complex when it comes to software development

  • not a lack of humility
  • just optimism to be able to do anything on the computer

• quality focused

• detailed oriented!

Clojure - Howard Lewis Ship

I have never programmed in Lisp. Considering the other panels in the same time slot I figured I would do something about that and increase my knowledge with the Clojure session.

Clojure is a partial Lisp clone on the JVM with support for software transactional memory to keep your concurrent processes running smoothly.

Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit - Nathaniel Schutta

This was the last panel I attended for the weekend, and a lot of fun. I enjoy thinking about and discussing learning techniques and such.

The only topic I will touch on here is the need for sleep. According to the research Nate referenced, if you consistently get six hours of sleep when you need eight it is like missing two nights of sleep. Staying up one night results in a 30% drop in cognitive function…

So go take a nap. A 26 minute nap gives a 34% boost to performance.