Signs that you're a good programmer (Part 2)

Part I

4. Fascinated by the incomprehensible

I am only just beginning to understand what a Fourier Transform does, but I've been studying them because I have the damn persistent feeling that I could be using them somehow. I don't know what I would use them for yet, but maybe I will someday. What I do know is that what I don't know will cost me in useless labor. 

Symptoms

1. Visits Lambda The Ultimate on a regular basis
2. Knows what ATP synthase is. Has extracted DNA from a banana in their kitchen
3. Owns a book with a dragon on the cover, especially if they don't write compilers
4. Giggles when someone says the phrase "This is recorded on sticky-tape and rust"
5. Shoves through a crowd at a party to get near someone who just used the word "Bayesian"
6. Buys drinks for people who work in other industries and seem willing to talk shop when drunk
7. Has a habit of boring people to tears explaining something tangentially related to the news, such as the cockpit layout of the Airbus 330
8. Has foreign-language versions of popular songs on their iPod
9. Envies but doesn't resent people with degrees in something they don't know

How to acquire this trait

This tends to start in childhood but can be cultivated in adulthood if you can commit to exploring your horizons. Friends are a major gateway: seek social occasions where you'll bump into people you don't know under circumstances where they'll be unhurried and at ease. This may involve alcohol. Don't try to impress them, don't compete with them, but display your ignorance willingly to see if they lean forward to correct and enlighten you. Then shut your fool trap and listen.

When you hear or read something you don't recognize then Google it or hit Wikipedia. For a programmer an equally superior resource is Ward Cunningham's Wiki, which deserves weeks of your life.

Computer programming has annexed all of the sciences and the feedback loop is so wide it stuns gods. From biology we took Genetic Algorithms. From climatology we took chaos theory. Biologists now use our work to fold proteins. Climatologists now use our simulations to predict armageddon. Everything informs us, and we inform everything. Either probe the unfathomable or retire on a "blub" programmer's salary. 

5. Compelled to teach

I once knew someone who thought it was good advice to "never teach everything you know" because they once lost a job after bringing a co-worker up to speed with all their skills. I stared at them with genuine incomprehension. A good manager would never get rid of someone who's not only capable of all their tasks but also demonstrates ability to train new workers. It would be like shooting the goose that lays golden eggs. If you get fired, it's probably for some other reason.

Symptoms

1. Blogs about their work
2. Has an active Wikipedia account
3. Unhesitant to pick up a marker and approach a whiteboard
4. Commits changes to the repository that consist only of comments
5. Lets new hires borrow books that cost them $100 to buy
6. Pauses "The Andromeda Strain" at the part about the sliver of paper getting between the bell and the ringer and grins like a madman

How to acquire this trait

I can only do this when I'm inspired or "in the mood", and I think that this mood is a product of circumstance, one that's made up of confidence, space, opportunity and provocation. When you're in school your teacher has the space and opportunity already supplied for them and their confidence is hopefully given by their training, but the inspiration is tricky; it's the difference between a good lesson that both the teacher and the student enjoys and a laborious exercise in rote memorization.

Novices in computer programming aren't usually novices in general, because they have lives and friends and family and hobbies and interests that have been going on for even longer. Maybe you do need to bore someone to tears by explaining something that's cool to you, even if it has nothing to do with programming. Maybe you have a younger sibling you can teach the guitar, or your favorite recipe, or how to balance on a pogo stick. Maybe you have a coworker who doesn't know how to ski. It doesn't matter the subject, just that you get a taste of what it's like to program someone else's brain in a positive way.

If you've never taught anything before you will discover, to an embarrassing degree, just how many times you can say "um" and "er" per minute, how badly you're prepared, and how easily you can forget that the student doesn't know details you haven't explained yet.

One of the tricks that worked for me was to volunteer for an opportunity to teach a complex subject (microbiology) to laymen. The first time I tried it I used a Post-It easel and a bunch of markers and tried to draw everything. I was all over the place. It was humiliating. But the audience, fortunately, was friendly.

The next year I tried again, but this time I had an iPad and used Keynote to put together a presentation, which was a lot of fun in itself, but this time the lesson went overwhelmingly more smoothly. I used lots of pictures, very little text, almost no bullet points, a handful of jokes, and just relied on my memory to talk about slides I had designed to provoke my memory more than illustrate anything to the audience.

The experience of doing an awful job the first time informed my next attempt, and now that I've done it three or four more times I find I'm getting slightly better. Not only that, I now know ten times more about the subject because I studied like crazy to help temper my fear of being asked a difficult question. Teaching teaches the teacher.