January, 2010
First of all, if you are not listening to radiolab, I am actively getting smarter than you. And yes, I know radio is an old technology - I listen via podcast.
I’ve been mulling over this post for the course of the long weekend after listening to a very old radiolab show on the topic of sleep. The entire show is fascinating but there are a couple parts in particular that resonated very clearly with all this talk lately about movement and loving your tools. Have you ever had the experience where you focus so intently on learning something to the point where you aren’t even really making progress anymore? And then, after a night of sleep you wake up and suddenly you can play that rift on the guitar or that problem you were trying to solve so hard is suddenly clear? This happens to me all the time and I’ve joked that I actually do some of my best problem solving in my sleep. Well Jad and Robert present some interesting theories around this behavior which is very widely recognized. It seems that the first couple hours of sleep are largely devoted to replaying the events of the day and a process not unlike erosion takes place where the master volume knob is turned down, lowering the noise of all your memories and experiences. What they found, however, is that things like practicing the guitar for hours and hours stick prominently above the rest of the background noise and although these erosive forces literally wash across your brain causing you to remember everything a little less clearly; at the end of the night the really important stuff now stands out clearly above everything else. That mountain of your focused guitar playing memory still got eroded away, but since it was so much higher than the rest of your memories from the day it actually ends up standing out clearer when you wake up. Not only do things that you focus on have this permanence in comparison to everything else, but basically anything that invokes some sort of emotional response. You emotions are like sticky notes to the brain signalling the importance of certain memories.
The next part of sleeping involves mixes the days experiences (after the erosive process has finished) with all your other memories. This is where things get weird and interesting and where in many cases people have claim to invent things in their sleep. It seems that you brain just kinda randomly starts combining things together - mixing and matching experiences with memories and senses.
What really stood out to me about all this was what it means for developers who love their jobs and their tools vs. developers that don’t. Between Joel and Brooks and many others, the general consensus is that all software developers are not created equal and that the good ones are better by orders of magnitude in terms of productivity and quality. I’m thinking a lot of that comes down to passion and emotional response to what you do on a daily basis. Sure, raw talent probably has something to do with it too, but when developers are passionate about what they do and in an environment where they love the tools they use and the software they are creating then you are basically getting double time from them.
Do your developers dream in code? Are you aware how valuable the ones that do are to your business?
