Become a Pragmatic Data Scientist | Andy Hunt

Andy Hunt_mixdown.mp3-from OneDrive

Andy: [00:00:00] I probably discovered computers around seventy six, seventy seven or so. In fact, the very first computer I ever experienced up close and personal not just read about was a teletype typewriter with an acoustic color. And you know, the kids in the audience are going, What's an acoustic coupler, grandpa? Right? If you remember the movie war games, you dial the phone with a handset and you stick a handset down in these foam cups and it goes. It makes the noises, and that's how you talk to the big giant mainframe, you know, and then literally in the next county over. So that was sort of my first, my first experience and I was hooked.

Harpreet: [00:00:51] What's up, everybody, welcome to the artists Data Science Podcast, the only self-development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours you can register to attend by going to Bitly.com/adsoh forward slash a d s o h i. Look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode, and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review.

Harpreet: [00:01:32] Our guest today is a programmer turned consultant, author and publisher. He's written over a dozen books, including the best selling seminal software development book The Pragmatic Programmer, and was one of 17 authors of The Agile

Harpreet: [00:01:51] Manifesto and

Harpreet: [00:01:53] Co-founder of the Agile Alliance. He also co-founded The Pragmatic

Harpreet: [00:01:57] Bookshelf, which has published

Harpreet: [00:01:58] Award winning and [00:02:00] critically acclaimed books for software developers and has authored books in the science fiction

Harpreet: [00:02:05] And adventure genres. He is an active

Harpreet: [00:02:08] Musician, creating interesting ambient music made with synthesizers like the Moog matriarch and a vintage Yamaha

Harpreet: [00:02:15] Rs five under the name.

Harpreet: [00:02:17] Sign up,

Harpreet: [00:02:18] So please help me in welcoming

Harpreet: [00:02:20] Our

Harpreet: [00:02:20] Guest today a man who

Harpreet: [00:02:22] Has a knack for stirring things up.

Harpreet: [00:02:24] Someone who has seen it and fixed it before. Andy Hunt Andy,

Harpreet: [00:02:28] Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to come on to the show today. I really appreciate having you here.

Harpreet: [00:02:32] Oh, thanks

Andy: [00:02:33] For having me. I was always a delight to to get out and chat and see what folks are up to.

Harpreet: [00:02:37] Yeah, then your books

Harpreet: [00:02:39] Are huge,

Harpreet: [00:02:40] Hit with the Data science community and software developers all around the world. Definitely fanboy moment here talking to a celebrity, so I'm really honored to have you here. So let's learn a little bit more about you. Talk to us a little bit about where you grew up and what was it like there.

Andy: [00:02:57] So not very interesting. The town wasn't very interesting, you know, certainly it was a small rural

Harpreet: [00:03:04] Town rural in the

Andy: [00:03:05] Sense that there were cows in fields by the side of the road, you know, not very high tech. You had to

Harpreet: [00:03:11] You couldn't walk really to a friend's

Andy: [00:03:13] House. You had to drive or be

Harpreet: [00:03:15] Driven, you know, was pretty spread out

Andy: [00:03:18] That in that regard. But it was, you know, I think for the time, it was sort of a typical typical growing up kind of situation.

Harpreet: [00:03:25] So you you went outside and played until it was dark, you know, in the

Andy: [00:03:28] Fields with sticks and twigs and you know the things that you would do in that circumstances. But what was

Harpreet: [00:03:35] Interesting?

Andy: [00:03:36] So this was this would have been the mid seventies, late seventies or so when I was in high

Harpreet: [00:03:41] School, we

Andy: [00:03:42] Had a family friend

Harpreet: [00:03:43] Who worked from home.

Andy: [00:03:45] He was part of a think tank

Harpreet: [00:03:46] At a large

Andy: [00:03:48] Fortune 10, Fortune five kind of company, and he worked for the think tank. So his claim to fame was he'd be mowing the yard, puttering around their Victorian mansion that was was downtown [00:04:00] and he'd have

Harpreet: [00:04:01] A thought and

Andy: [00:04:02] Run into his study. You know, this, you know, nicely appointed library. You know, you can picture it right, you know, the bookshelves and first editions and this kind of show he'd run into his desk at his library and jot down his thoughts because it's not like he had a

Harpreet: [00:04:15] Computer in his

Andy: [00:04:16] House in seventy five seventy six, whatever, this was seventy four. But I thought that was that really struck me as, wow, you could you could make a living,

Harpreet: [00:04:27] Thinking and pondering

Andy: [00:04:29] And, you know, run into your home office, which was a radical. I mean, nobody had a home office back then, right? That was a very radical idea, but it kind of stuck with me. I was like, Oh, there could be something to this.

Harpreet: [00:04:41] And then I probably

Andy: [00:04:43] Discovered computers around seventy six, seventy seven or so. And in fact, the very first computer I

Harpreet: [00:04:50] Ever experienced

Andy: [00:04:52] Up close and personal not just read

Harpreet: [00:04:54] About was a teletype typewriter with an

Andy: [00:04:57] Acoustic

Harpreet: [00:04:58] Coupler.

Andy: [00:04:58] And you know, the kids of the audience are going, What's an acoustic coupler, grandpa? Right? If you remember the movie war games, you dial the phone with the handset and you stick the handset down in these phone cups and it goes, shoot. It makes the noises. And that's how you talked to the big giant mainframe,

Harpreet: [00:05:17] You know,

Andy: [00:05:17] And then literally in the next

Harpreet: [00:05:19] County over. So that was sort of my first, my first

Andy: [00:05:21] Experience and I was hooked, right? Of course. What's the first thing you do write you write the little program to print out asterisks and make a little thing.

Harpreet: [00:05:29] And, you know, maybe

Andy: [00:05:31] Hangman, you know, the Star Trek lander, you know that that kind of that kind of stuff. But as soon as I as soon as I sort of

Harpreet: [00:05:38] Saw what

Andy: [00:05:40] A computer was and what it could do, I was kind of hooked.

Harpreet: [00:05:43] It's like, This is cool.

Andy: [00:05:45] I mean, this is a long way from Star Trek, right? You can't talk. It it can't think for you, but the potential is here, so I was hooked at a really early age.

Harpreet: [00:05:54] So from that early age, did you just decide I'm going to go to school and I'm going to study computers and [00:06:00] software? And was that kind of what you had imagined your future would look like

Harpreet: [00:06:04] At that age? Pretty much,

Andy: [00:06:05] Yeah. It was like, This is something I want to I want to go into. I want to do. And I got my very first computer was sixty five

Harpreet: [00:06:13] 02 based chip and programed

Andy: [00:06:16] It in assembly

Andy: [00:06:17] Language, you know, kind of deal.

Andy: [00:06:19] And you know, it was there was a lot of fun back then because you were really so close to the hardware. I wrote a one. One of my very first programs was a word processor that built up the text by sticking characters in the

Harpreet: [00:06:32] Video memory, right?

Andy: [00:06:33] You know, you had you had this chunk of memory that was memory mapped straight to the display.

Harpreet: [00:06:38] And you know,

Andy: [00:06:39] It's kind

Harpreet: [00:06:39] Of funny that was

Andy: [00:06:41] Insanely

Harpreet: [00:06:42] Fast, you know,

Andy: [00:06:43] Hardware speeds and you slogging you today with, you know, I don't know, intel AJ or vs code or whatever. It's like, you know,

Harpreet: [00:06:51] We

Andy: [00:06:52] We've gained a lot, but we've lost some immediacy when you need, you know, 15 gigabyte ram just to fire up an editor and type something.

Harpreet: [00:07:00] So I kind

Andy: [00:07:01] Of I kind of miss the simpler days

Harpreet: [00:07:04] Sometimes.

Harpreet: [00:07:05] So that kind of leads really nicely to my next question because this is something that, you know, I'm not a, you know, software developer by trade.

Harpreet: [00:07:12] I came up as a

Harpreet: [00:07:13] Statistician and studied mathematics and grad school and all that stuff. But what is the difference between a software developer and a software engineer?

Andy: [00:07:22] Well, I'm not sure there's a huge difference.

Andy: [00:07:26] There's shades of gray, and it really kind of depends on the focus. So, you

Harpreet: [00:07:30] Know, back in the day, certainly

Andy: [00:07:32] When I was, you know, just out of college and young, you would be introduced at a family gathering or a party is, oh, he's into using

Harpreet: [00:07:39] Computers, you know, and that kind of covered it.

Andy: [00:07:42] That was just like,

Harpreet: [00:07:43] Oh, OK, we know nothing

Andy: [00:07:44] About that. It's it's one of these computer folk. And now it's like, Well, I'm a senior DevOps engineer, you know, it's very, very specific.

Harpreet: [00:07:52] So, you know, I

Andy: [00:07:53] Tend to sort of sort

Harpreet: [00:07:55] It as you've got people

Andy: [00:07:56] Who consider themselves really

Harpreet: [00:07:58] Just coders, just

Andy: [00:07:59] Programmers. [00:08:00] So they're not doing a lot of design work, they're just kind of bumping along. And maybe that's kind of the more novice end of the spectrum when you're just starting out in the industry and you're still

Andy: [00:08:10] Grappling with, how do

Andy: [00:08:12] I convey my thoughts to the computer who keeps telling me I'm missing a damn semicolon or a tab or curly brace or

Harpreet: [00:08:19] Whatever it might be? And then it's a matter of sort of, you know,

Andy: [00:08:23] I tend to think of a software engineer as someone who's more oriented on systems program,

Harpreet: [00:08:28] More

Andy: [00:08:28] Oriented on maybe deployment and container orchestration

Harpreet: [00:08:33] And

Andy: [00:08:34] Writing their own

Andy: [00:08:35] Compiler for fun in the evening know those sorts of things as opposed to more of an application developer. And you know, as you kind of go up the food chain, I've always viewed that a software

Harpreet: [00:08:46] Developer is kind of

Andy: [00:08:48] What I would want to aspire to. Right, that's that's the person

Harpreet: [00:08:51] Who can go in and talk to the user,

Andy: [00:08:53] Understand their business, understand

Harpreet: [00:08:55] Their needs and

Andy: [00:08:57] Envision an architecture and envision the tools and the things that will

Harpreet: [00:09:01] Make that vision

Andy: [00:09:03] Come to pass, which involves

Harpreet: [00:09:05] Code. It also involves architecture,

Andy: [00:09:08] Involves engineering, it involves

Harpreet: [00:09:10] A ton

Andy: [00:09:11] Of communication skills. So it's really to me, that's kind of the superset

Harpreet: [00:09:15] Of you're able to do it all, you know?

Andy: [00:09:18] I kind of laugh

Andy: [00:09:19] Because, you know, people use the phrase full stack

Harpreet: [00:09:21] Developer and I

Andy: [00:09:23] Laugh because

Harpreet: [00:09:23] It's not. I mean, you're talking

Andy: [00:09:25] About some front end web technologies and some server

Harpreet: [00:09:28] Technologies. A full stack

Andy: [00:09:30] Developer is

Harpreet: [00:09:31] Comfortable with sixty five

Andy: [00:09:32] Oh two

Harpreet: [00:09:33] Assembler all the way up to

Andy: [00:09:34] International

Harpreet: [00:09:35] Treaties, right?

Andy: [00:09:36] Because that's what that's what it ends up being.

Harpreet: [00:09:38] You know, as you know,

Andy: [00:09:40] I've been running the pragmatic bookshelf since with Dave Thomas, and I founded it in

Harpreet: [00:09:45] 03. So do the math that that's been a decade and a half plus.

Andy: [00:09:49] I mean, that's been some years. You know, when you run your own

Harpreet: [00:09:52] International popular business, you literally

Andy: [00:09:55] Run

Harpreet: [00:09:56] Into problems with

Andy: [00:09:58] Treaties and tax, you know, taxation and trade [00:10:00] routes. You know, it sounds like Star

Harpreet: [00:10:01] Wars, but you

Andy: [00:10:02] Know that that stuff is part of your business and then you're

Harpreet: [00:10:04] Debugging some bit of

Andy: [00:10:06] Music tech or something on your laptop. That's wrong and you're down with, you know, transistors and gates

Harpreet: [00:10:12] And you know that

Andy: [00:10:13] Level of stuff.

Harpreet: [00:10:13] So yeah, if you're fluent from the hardware level up

Andy: [00:10:17] To the sort of, you know, social fabric that you're enmeshed in, that's a full

Harpreet: [00:10:22] Stack developer. And and

Andy: [00:10:24] Everything else is very specialties,

Harpreet: [00:10:26] You know, which is fine. And, you know, in a

Andy: [00:10:28] Way, that's one of the good things I think has happened

Harpreet: [00:10:31] As the industry has matured, it's gone from being, I mean, computers, which can

Andy: [00:10:37] Mean anything from like, I can fix your printer,

Harpreet: [00:10:40] You know, up to, you know,

Andy: [00:10:41] Really being able to to architect the future,

Harpreet: [00:10:44] Not to be too too grandiose

Andy: [00:10:46] About it. But you know, that's kind of.

Harpreet: [00:10:49] What you're doing? Yeah, I

Harpreet: [00:10:50] Really like that, thank you so much for going deep on that. I appreciate that. So speaking of, you know, the pragmatic bookshelf, you get the pragmatic programmer, pragmatic thinking, what is it with this pragmatic stuff? What does that mean to you?

Harpreet: [00:11:04] Well, it's

Andy: [00:11:05] The actual origin story is

Harpreet: [00:11:07] Kind of funny because back

Andy: [00:11:09] In the day

Harpreet: [00:11:09] When you know, before there was

Andy: [00:11:11] Google, before there was long before there was Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or Insta or any of these sorts of things, there was you

Harpreet: [00:11:18] Snap and

Andy: [00:11:19] You had articles going back and forth. You had interest groups, you had

Harpreet: [00:11:22] Usenet groups where

Andy: [00:11:23] You could discuss things and there was one, you know, the sort of popular watering hole of the day was dot

Harpreet: [00:11:29] Object. So think of that

Andy: [00:11:31] In modern parlance,

Harpreet: [00:11:32] That'd be our object

Andy: [00:11:34] Oriented programing or something like that.

Harpreet: [00:11:37] And there was a ongoing,

Andy: [00:11:41] Very

Harpreet: [00:11:43] Spirited debate about

Andy: [00:11:45] Dogmatism and pragmatism and craft and is programing, craft or art.

Harpreet: [00:11:50] And there was certainly

Andy: [00:11:53] One gentleman,

Andy: [00:11:54] Possibly a set of them who

Harpreet: [00:11:56] Really advocated a very well.

Andy: [00:11:59] We [00:12:00] consider a dogmatic approach being a slave to process a slave to your ideology. It has to be this

Harpreet: [00:12:05] Way because that's

Andy: [00:12:06] The way it is. It's how God intended it. And this is this is the thing,

Harpreet: [00:12:10] And that just rubbed us

Andy: [00:12:12] So much the

Harpreet: [00:12:14] Wrong way. It's like,

Andy: [00:12:15] No, you don't want to be a slave to your process. You don't want to be a slave to any particular ideology, whether it's object orientation or functional programing

Harpreet: [00:12:24] Or

Andy: [00:12:25] Whatever it might be, you want to focus

Harpreet: [00:12:27] On outcomes, you know,

Andy: [00:12:29] Eye on the prize. What is it you're actually trying to accomplish and really focus on

Harpreet: [00:12:34] That and

Andy: [00:12:34] Don't get caught in the trap

Harpreet: [00:12:37] Of doing the same

Andy: [00:12:38] Old

Harpreet: [00:12:38] Thing unquestioningly, you know, ask

Andy: [00:12:41] The questions, focus on the outcomes and

Harpreet: [00:12:43] Do the

Andy: [00:12:44] Pragmatic thing is, well, this is what this looks like. This is what's going to work to do that.

Harpreet: [00:12:49] Maybe we've never done it before. Maybe that

Andy: [00:12:52] Violates our our ideology or violates our process, but it's what we need

Harpreet: [00:12:56] To do. So do that like that a lot.

Harpreet: [00:12:59] Thank you. Thank you. So so is this like a subtle mind? Like, it's not a really a subtle mindset shift is a massive mindset shift.

Harpreet: [00:13:07] Do you think it's ever

Harpreet: [00:13:08] Too late in your career as a software developer software engineer to to start thinking like this? What if you're somebody who's just been constrained by your processes? You know, the entire first half of your career

Andy: [00:13:19] Is thinking that it's hard to break out of that. And interestingly, you kind of see that even

Harpreet: [00:13:26] Now with people

Andy: [00:13:27] Who have fallen prey to to an overreliance or over adherence to scrum. You know, one of the things that

Harpreet: [00:13:33] And I've mentioned this on

Andy: [00:13:34] Multiple

Harpreet: [00:13:35] Interviews for years,

Andy: [00:13:36] If I actually just saw a reference

Harpreet: [00:13:38] Back in like I think it was

Andy: [00:13:39] Like two thousand six saying, My God, people are getting it wrong. They're misunderstanding

Harpreet: [00:13:44] And you know, they get

Andy: [00:13:46] So caught

Andy: [00:13:47] Up in trying to do scrum

Harpreet: [00:13:49] Right. Whatever the hell, that means

Andy: [00:13:51] That they're not getting software out the door and they're not solving their users

Harpreet: [00:13:55] Business issues.

Andy: [00:13:57] They're not creating value

Harpreet: [00:13:58] Because they're, you [00:14:00] know, arguing how

Andy: [00:14:01] Many angels

Andy: [00:14:02] Can dance on the head of

Harpreet: [00:14:03] A pin sort of thing.

Andy: [00:14:04] You know, are we doing story points

Harpreet: [00:14:06] The right way? Well, no.

Andy: [00:14:07] If you're doing story

Andy: [00:14:08] Points, you're doing it wrong right out of the gate.

Harpreet: [00:14:09] So don't do that, you know? But it's it's yeah, it's really

Andy: [00:14:14] Hard when you're especially when you're in an

Harpreet: [00:14:16] Organization that

Andy: [00:14:18] Has

Andy: [00:14:18] Kind of slid into a

Harpreet: [00:14:20] Bureaucratic sludge, which which happens.

Andy: [00:14:23] In fact, if you look this research, the Western

Harpreet: [00:14:25] Continuum is a really interesting look at different types

Andy: [00:14:29] Of organizations.

Harpreet: [00:14:30] And on the upper end, and

Andy: [00:14:32] What we would like to see is a

Harpreet: [00:14:33] Pragmatic, agile,

Andy: [00:14:35] Flexible

Harpreet: [00:14:36] Kind of thing they call

Andy: [00:14:38] Generative.

Harpreet: [00:14:38] And that's where the information flows freely.

Andy: [00:14:41] Everyone's able to share ideas and bounce things off each

Harpreet: [00:14:44] Other without

Andy: [00:14:46] Fear that you're going to get your butt kicked or get demoted or get in trouble for saying the wrong thing

Harpreet: [00:14:51] Or anything like that. It's a free

Andy: [00:14:52] Flow of ideas. You experiment, you

Harpreet: [00:14:54] Try things, and those are

Andy: [00:14:56] The organizations that are

Harpreet: [00:14:57] High performing and produce a lot of value. At the other end of the spectrum, you get the

Andy: [00:15:02] Pathological organization where people hoard

Harpreet: [00:15:05] Information. You know, it's like

Andy: [00:15:06] Their little fiefdom.

Andy: [00:15:07] They don't want you to know because they're in charge of it. Damn it,

Harpreet: [00:15:10] And you get

Andy: [00:15:12] This kind of friction built up. And that's the kind of organization that really loves to hide behind the rules and behind hide behind the process. It's like, Well, yes, that's a good idea, but we can't do that because you didn't fill out the right forms.

Harpreet: [00:15:25] You didn't go through

Andy: [00:15:26] Proper channels, you didn't genuflect to the great god of COBOL or whatever,

Harpreet: [00:15:32] Whatever

Andy: [00:15:33] They're into.

Harpreet: [00:15:34] And you know, that happens.

Andy: [00:15:37] Organizations slide

Harpreet: [00:15:38] Into that, people slide into

Andy: [00:15:39] That and they end up being

Harpreet: [00:15:42] Low performing. These are the places

Andy: [00:15:44] Where you then see on the news massive layoffs

Harpreet: [00:15:47] And some startup.

Andy: [00:15:48] Comes into their industry and

Harpreet: [00:15:50] Eats them alive, and

Andy: [00:15:52] That's that's just how it goes,

Harpreet: [00:15:54] So yeah, that's

Andy: [00:15:55] A that's a big risk, that's a big danger. It absolutely

Harpreet: [00:15:58] Happens. And if [00:16:00] you find

Andy: [00:16:00] Yourself in that kind of an organization or find that you fall fallen into that kind

Harpreet: [00:16:04] Of mindset, you

Andy: [00:16:06] Should do something about it. You know, you should try to break out of that. Martin Fowler had a

Harpreet: [00:16:11] Great quote, which I love to

Andy: [00:16:13] Use. He's like,

Andy: [00:16:13] Well, you really have two

Harpreet: [00:16:14] Choices you can change

Andy: [00:16:16] Your

Harpreet: [00:16:16] Organization or change your organization.

Andy: [00:16:18] You know, if you can, if you can affect the change where you are, that's great. If you

Harpreet: [00:16:22] Can't, maybe

Andy: [00:16:23] You shouldn't stay there. You should go somewhere else.

Harpreet: [00:16:26] I think it was

Harpreet: [00:16:26] In pragmatic

Harpreet: [00:16:27] Program where you

Harpreet: [00:16:28] Recanted a story where there was people who were working, I believe was like on a factory floor and as a form of defiance. They started to just follow the rules religiously,

Harpreet: [00:16:39] And things

Harpreet: [00:16:39] Just slowed down to a

Harpreet: [00:16:40] Complete halt. Yeah, that's

Andy: [00:16:42] An

Andy: [00:16:43] Actual thing. It's called work to rule, and it's something that like like labor unions use when they're in a management dispute, they're like, All right,

Harpreet: [00:16:51] Well, we're just going to slam

Andy: [00:16:53] Our productivity down by doing exactly what the job

Harpreet: [00:16:56] Says, which, of course, you

Andy: [00:16:58] Know, that's not how it works, right? If the job was that easy to automate, then a bloody robot or a conveyor belt

Harpreet: [00:17:05] Would be doing it right. But we're hired to

Andy: [00:17:07] Do the

Harpreet: [00:17:08] Things that

Andy: [00:17:09] Robots or AI or neural nets machine learning can't

Harpreet: [00:17:12] Do because it needs creativity. And there's a really interesting dynamic there.

Andy: [00:17:18] You know, these sort of pathologic bureaucratic

Harpreet: [00:17:21] Organizations try

Andy: [00:17:23] To optimize

Harpreet: [00:17:24] Their processes so they try

Andy: [00:17:26] To nail down and remove variance.

Harpreet: [00:17:29] And that's

Andy: [00:17:29] Great. If you're running like a manufacturing line and a

Harpreet: [00:17:33] Production line, you want to

Andy: [00:17:35] Reduce variance, you want everything to come out the same

Harpreet: [00:17:37] Way. But if you're

Andy: [00:17:38] Doing any kind of creative,

Harpreet: [00:17:39] Inventive work, you did the

Andy: [00:17:41] Exact

Harpreet: [00:17:41] Opposite of that. You need as much

Andy: [00:17:43] Variation as you can as you can have. It's like trying to do a seed evolution or genetic program or something.

Harpreet: [00:17:50] You need as much variation so you

Andy: [00:17:53] Can have evolutionary

Harpreet: [00:17:54] Processes. Pick the best

Andy: [00:17:56] Way forward out of it. I know one of my favorite stories trying to explain [00:18:00] how AI

Harpreet: [00:18:01] Works to

Andy: [00:18:02] To a layperson, right when my son was in sixth grade,

Harpreet: [00:18:05] Maybe sixth grade, which

Andy: [00:18:07] Was actually kind

Harpreet: [00:18:07] Of cool, they had them do a

Andy: [00:18:09] Little

Harpreet: [00:18:09] Ai project in, I

Andy: [00:18:11] Think, in some Python libraries. And the idea was you had to make this little stick figure walk across this virtual landscape. So you did design

Harpreet: [00:18:18] Legs basically using

Andy: [00:18:20] A physics library.

Harpreet: [00:18:21] Well, interestingly, by

Andy: [00:18:23] Just sort of by happenstance, the way he coded it,

Harpreet: [00:18:26] There was a bug in the physics library. And so

Andy: [00:18:29] His I learned how to

Harpreet: [00:18:30] Fly, which

Andy: [00:18:32] I mean total crack up, right? Because that is exactly

Harpreet: [00:18:36] What

Andy: [00:18:36] I does. It doesn't care

Harpreet: [00:18:38] About you filling

Andy: [00:18:40] Out the right forms or the protocol it will. It's trying to find the best path. And if that happens to exploit cosmic rays, hitting the chip and quantum effects and a bug in the library. And you know, the fact that it's facing east instead

Harpreet: [00:18:54] Of west, it doesn't care.

Andy: [00:18:55] It'll right. It's almost the definition of pragmatic. It will do what it needs to do to, you know, hit

Harpreet: [00:19:02] The the assigned target,

Andy: [00:19:04] Whatever that might be, which can be surprising

Harpreet: [00:19:07] Sometimes. But I love that

Andy: [00:19:08] Story because that that really, to me points out the, you know, that's what AI is all about. And in a way that, again, that's really kind of the essence of pragmatism. It's like, all right, if the quantum effects are going to do it for us, well, let's use that.

Harpreet: [00:19:22] It's really cool

Harpreet: [00:19:23] That they, you know, getting introduced this stuff at such a young age.

Harpreet: [00:19:27] I mean, for

Harpreet: [00:19:28] Context, I was born in nineteen eighty three. I'm almost 38

Harpreet: [00:19:31] Now, and

Harpreet: [00:19:32] I was first introduced to computers, probably around that age, maybe a little bit younger, like maybe fourth or fifth grade.

Harpreet: [00:19:38] I had. Like, I think it was like a three eighty six

Harpreet: [00:19:40] And had like Windows three, not even three point

Harpreet: [00:19:42] One. I was pretty old school

Harpreet: [00:19:44] And I would, you know, fell in love with computers as well. Remember, my mom bought me a book, Dos for Dummies and, you know, followed along with that. And for whatever various reasons, I kind of veered off that path and have recently been returning to this thing that I've loved as a child.

Harpreet: [00:19:59] But I feel like [00:20:00]

Harpreet: [00:20:00] At this age, thirty seven years old,

Harpreet: [00:20:01] Like, you know, it's a little bit old, right?

Harpreet: [00:20:04] But you know, it's just for me to become a

Harpreet: [00:20:08] Super wonderful software engineer

Harpreet: [00:20:11] Software developer. I feel like

Harpreet: [00:20:12] It would require too much focus,

Harpreet: [00:20:13] Time and effort. So I'm

Harpreet: [00:20:15] Wondering, is it possible

Harpreet: [00:20:17] For me to be

Harpreet: [00:20:17] Able to think like a

Harpreet: [00:20:19] Software engineer, like an exceptional software engineer or software developer without necessarily

Harpreet: [00:20:24] Being one?

Andy: [00:20:25] I think so. And it's funny you talk about, you know, early experiences and, you know, starting with the 386, I kind of a lot of folks are amazed when I tell them that, you know, I was using email before

Harpreet: [00:20:36] There was an at sign. We use bang

Andy: [00:20:37] Paths. There was not an app sign that wasn't a thing. There was no IBM PC. There was no ADA six. We had 80 chips and, you know, sixty five oh, 2s and that sort of thing. But, you know, getting back to

Harpreet: [00:20:50] Sort of like at what

Andy: [00:20:51] Age and what skill sets you need? Yes, you do

Harpreet: [00:20:54] Need the the

Andy: [00:20:56] Ability to have sustained uninterrupted

Harpreet: [00:21:00] Focus and you know, for

Andy: [00:21:02] A variety of reasons, especially now with the pandemic, with the political instability in the U.S., all these other sorts of issues. It's really hard to

Harpreet: [00:21:12] Sort of

Andy: [00:21:12] Focus

Harpreet: [00:21:13] On, you know, your

Andy: [00:21:14] Task, your job and not watch

Harpreet: [00:21:17] Twitter and Reddit and

Andy: [00:21:19] The news and all these sorts of dramatic things that are happening in the background. You're kind of keeping an eye on.

Harpreet: [00:21:26] But the

Andy: [00:21:27] Two keys, I think, for being able to to get into the programing

Harpreet: [00:21:31] Mindset, you need a pretty

Andy: [00:21:33] Significant working

Harpreet: [00:21:34] Memory, which you

Andy: [00:21:35] Lose as

Harpreet: [00:21:36] You get older.

Andy: [00:21:37] And I think that that's that's an advantage that youth has. You can kind of hold more in your head at once and that that's important. You need to be able to do that and you need that ability to sort of focus

Harpreet: [00:21:48] On one thing long enough

Andy: [00:21:51] To sort of get

Harpreet: [00:21:52] Through it. And you need the

Andy: [00:21:53] Ability to kind of zoom in and zoom out at different levels of

Harpreet: [00:21:57] Abstraction and

Andy: [00:21:58] Know

Harpreet: [00:21:59] That what [00:22:00] I'm

Andy: [00:22:00] Doing here, this is an appropriate

Harpreet: [00:22:02] Level

Andy: [00:22:02] Of abstraction. So a lot of beginning programmers

Harpreet: [00:22:05] Will fall

Andy: [00:22:06] Into a trap where they have what's called primitive

Harpreet: [00:22:09] Obsession.

Andy: [00:22:10] Everything is in

Harpreet: [00:22:11] Or string or Boolean, and they don't

Andy: [00:22:14] Use higher order Data

Harpreet: [00:22:15] Structures to do

Andy: [00:22:16] Things.

Harpreet: [00:22:17] But then,

Andy: [00:22:18] You know, you get that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, right? You learn some stuff and then they go the other way. And everything is an

Harpreet: [00:22:25] Abstraction and you get

Andy: [00:22:26] Nightmares like, you know, Java's service manager, imple, you know

Harpreet: [00:22:31] This one hundred

Andy: [00:22:32] And thirty character, long class name, you know, kind of thing where you've abstracted yourself into your navel and have

Harpreet: [00:22:39] Disappeared, you know, kind of

Andy: [00:22:41] Like an aura, Boris. You've just, you know, disappeared in yourself.

Harpreet: [00:22:45] And that's the kind of thing that you know, you

Andy: [00:22:47] Just need the experience to be able to know what's at the right level. So, yeah, I mean, I think you can I think you can start and learn to programing, learn to program, you know, really at any age, you know, up until the point. I mean, you up to a certain point where you hit an elderly state, where you've

Harpreet: [00:23:03] Lost working memory

Andy: [00:23:05] And loss of cognitive ability, which is going to happen to all of us, you know, sadly, you know, one of these

Harpreet: [00:23:10] Days. But you know,

Andy: [00:23:11] Barring that, it's like, yeah, you can start now

Harpreet: [00:23:15] As a separate diatribe.

Andy: [00:23:17] I personally think that sort of right now in the last couple

Harpreet: [00:23:20] Of years, the world

Andy: [00:23:22] Of

Harpreet: [00:23:22] Programing sucks.

Andy: [00:23:24] It's an embarrassment this this sort of cobble together Rube Goldberg machine nightmare of, you know, CSS and HTML and JavaScript, which is a nightmare of a language and bless their hearts. I mean, they've been they've added some nice features to it. They've really, you know, there are folks trying to make this, make this work and make

Harpreet: [00:23:44] This better, but it's got

Andy: [00:23:46] Some horrible

Harpreet: [00:23:47] Legacy edges to it,

Andy: [00:23:49] As does HTML and CSS and the whole, you know, the whole HB protocol. And you know, that whole world is really kind of pasted

Harpreet: [00:23:57] Together, not

Andy: [00:23:59] Really intended for [00:24:00] what we're ending up using it from. And then if these swings of, well, should you have a fat client and a thin server or a server in a thin client, should everything be a client side library and it's all in react or whatever, should it all be done server side, server side rendering and you pump it down

Harpreet: [00:24:16] And that's almost like, you know,

Andy: [00:24:18] Hem lengths with fashion. You know, it comes and goes, it goes up, it goes down, it goes back.

Harpreet: [00:24:24] But I think

Andy: [00:24:24] Right

Harpreet: [00:24:24] Now, you know, the any of these

Andy: [00:24:27] Ecosystems have

Harpreet: [00:24:28] Giant

Andy: [00:24:29] Repositories

Harpreet: [00:24:30] Like npm, you know, for

Andy: [00:24:32] Javascript programing. I mean, that's just a security and performance nightmare.

Harpreet: [00:24:37] You install

Andy: [00:24:38] Something. Well, I think I saw the other day, if you install like a basic hello world in

Harpreet: [00:24:42] React, it brings

Andy: [00:24:43] In something like 5000

Harpreet: [00:24:44] Modules and you have no idea

Andy: [00:24:46] What those are or who wrote them or where they came from or whether it was from, you know, a foreign adversary government slipping something in there, or some high school kid who didn't know what he was doing or something like Left Pad, which disappeared entirely out of the repo and broke half the internet, was

Andy: [00:25:01] A couple of years ago, I guess two to three years ago.

Harpreet: [00:25:04] So, yeah, right now it's a mess.

Andy: [00:25:07] I was helping a friend last week try to install

Harpreet: [00:25:09] Ruby on his

Andy: [00:25:10] Latest edition of the Mac OS,

Harpreet: [00:25:12] And it was a nightmare. The latest edition

Andy: [00:25:14] Of this didn't work with the version of that, and there were problems with this other thing.

Harpreet: [00:25:18] And, you know, it's kind of embarrassing at the moment.

Andy: [00:25:22] The good news is I'm not the only one who thinks this, and there are some very smart people working on things saying, OK, you know, now that as the industry has evolved, we've gotten to sort of this point now we've got a better idea of how this stuff should work.

Harpreet: [00:25:36] Let's look at these

Andy: [00:25:38] Alternative ideas and better ways of doing things and, you know, push the envelope

Harpreet: [00:25:42] Forward.

Andy: [00:25:43] And I'm hoping in

Harpreet: [00:25:44] The next, you know,

Andy: [00:25:46] Three four year time frame. We'll kind of start to dig ourselves out

Harpreet: [00:25:50] Of the the current

Andy: [00:25:52] Legacy patchwork nightmare and look at some new ways of doing stuff. I know the in the elixir programing language.

Harpreet: [00:25:59] The stuff they're doing [00:26:00]

Andy: [00:26:00] With live view is really very interesting and it's a different way of programing on the web. And it's brilliantly fast and responsive with low overhead and low number of dependencies.

Harpreet: [00:26:11] And, you know, things like

Andy: [00:26:13] That that folks are working

Harpreet: [00:26:14] On that aren't necessarily ready

Andy: [00:26:16] For prime time yet

Harpreet: [00:26:17] Will be. And that'll be very interesting, given that the current state of programing sucks.

Harpreet: [00:26:22] Everybody needs to go pick up a copy of pregnant programmer to learn how to not suck.

Harpreet: [00:26:27] But if there

Harpreet: [00:26:28] Was, if there was one, just because this book is chock full of amazing tips and advice. But if there's one tip that you think programmers should

Harpreet: [00:26:36] Start implementing today, which one would that be?

Andy: [00:26:40] It's it's a hard question, right? So there's a lot of interesting stuff.

Harpreet: [00:26:44] I think the two probably

Andy: [00:26:46] The two most

Harpreet: [00:26:47] Critical tips to me

Andy: [00:26:49] And one would apply even if you're not a programmer. But if you're working with programmers, then our discussion of tracer bullet

Harpreet: [00:26:55] Development, I think, is really critical because, you know, folks have been waving their

Andy: [00:27:00] Hands and shouting, saying, you have to do iterative and incremental development. You have to do sicced, you know, continuous integration, continuous deployment.

Harpreet: [00:27:07] And the bosses are like, you know,

Andy: [00:27:09] Why it's expensive. The pipeline failed. We don't have an engineer to fix it. We went, they don't really

Harpreet: [00:27:16] Understand the idea that you've got to

Andy: [00:27:20] Break it down into the smallest

Harpreet: [00:27:22] Possible

Andy: [00:27:22] Pieces, you know, one at two

Harpreet: [00:27:24] Lines of code. Check it, test it.

Andy: [00:27:26] You have someone look at it who's going to use it and say, Yes, that's what I want it to

Harpreet: [00:27:29] Do and then go

Andy: [00:27:31] On and do the

Harpreet: [00:27:31] Next thing. You know,

Andy: [00:27:32] We again, we slip into these old habits of doing OK, even a two week

Harpreet: [00:27:37] Iteration that's

Andy: [00:27:38] That's too long. That's ridiculous. Now you've got a ton of features that somebody has to go through and review this

Harpreet: [00:27:43] Big pile of stuff. And you know what happens

Andy: [00:27:46] When you're given a big pile of stuff to do? You know you're going to skate over it.

Harpreet: [00:27:49] You're going to give it a thing.

Andy: [00:27:51] But here's one small thing look at this.

Harpreet: [00:27:53] Ok, great. Here's another

Andy: [00:27:54] Small thing. Look at that. Ok, great.

Harpreet: [00:27:56] And, you know, working

Andy: [00:27:57] In that very small, very piecemeal approach [00:28:00] so that you can get feedback and make adjustments in

Harpreet: [00:28:03] Real time is

Andy: [00:28:05] Absolutely critical. And you have you really

Harpreet: [00:28:07] Have to do that in this day and

Andy: [00:28:09] Age. If you don't again, someone who does do that, it's going to eat your lunch. So that's a very important one for like a personal practice or tip something from the book that any

Harpreet: [00:28:19] Programmer should do.

Andy: [00:28:21] I would have to say that there's a tip in there called Build Your Knowledge portfolio,

Harpreet: [00:28:25] And that

Andy: [00:28:25] Speaks to continuous learning, which is an absolutely critical ingredient to success. You know, there was an interview with Elon Musk not too long

Harpreet: [00:28:34] Ago where he reads a book or five a night. Just, you know,

Andy: [00:28:39] Here's an interesting book

Harpreet: [00:28:40] On, you know,

Andy: [00:28:41] Economic patterns. Here's an interesting book on neuroscience. It's an interesting book

Harpreet: [00:28:46] On obering

Andy: [00:28:47] Failures, on jet engines, whatever you know, just plow through the stuff that really is what

Harpreet: [00:28:53] It takes. And unfortunately,

Andy: [00:28:55] Our educational system

Harpreet: [00:28:57] Lacks a lot

Andy: [00:28:58] In this day and age. It still has

Harpreet: [00:29:00] Some kind of 19th

Andy: [00:29:01] Century leftovers.

Harpreet: [00:29:03] You know,

Andy: [00:29:03] Even the idea that

Harpreet: [00:29:04] That there's a teacher, really, you don't get taught, you have to learn it's

Andy: [00:29:09] On you, it's on the learner. So we kind of look at that whole relationship sort of the wrong way around. And, you know, I've gone in as a consultant and told people that, you know, the learning is up to you. Your company is not going to spoon feed it to you. You're not just going to suddenly

Harpreet: [00:29:24] Learn how to orchestrate

Andy: [00:29:26] A Kubernetes cluster by osmosis. I mean, you have to dig in and learn this stuff.

Harpreet: [00:29:31] You know,

Andy: [00:29:31] You want to know how to set up a neural net to do machine learning or whatever. Well, you know, you're not just going to grab a couple of libraries and copy and paste some code from Stack Overflow. I mean, people do, but that doesn't work out really well. You actually really have to dig

Harpreet: [00:29:46] In and learn

Andy: [00:29:48] How the stuff works, and that means more than reading a couple of blog posts or a couple of YouTube

Harpreet: [00:29:53] Videos, you

Andy: [00:29:55] Know? I mean, this is a little self-serving. It's like you have to go out and buy books, you have to look at long.

Harpreet: [00:29:59] And [00:30:00] even if it's not a

Andy: [00:30:00] Book, but you have to get to the

Harpreet: [00:30:02] Experts and the

Andy: [00:30:03] Qualified experts and see what they're recommending, what they're saying, see how they've learned and see what their tips and tricks are. And that's really an ongoing process. It never stops. There was a study some years back

Harpreet: [00:30:17] That said, and this wasn't

Andy: [00:30:18] Specific to computer science. I hope the rate's a little different for us. But it said, you know, across the population,

Harpreet: [00:30:24] Most people never read a book in

Andy: [00:30:28] The subject that they graduated in. Once they graduated, so they go to uni, they go to to

Harpreet: [00:30:33] College and they get a degree

Andy: [00:30:34] And whatever, and they never touch another book in that subject after they graduate. And you know, to me, that's that's insane with the rate of change that we're seeing in the world today. And that's another. I'm going to head off on a million tangents as we go through here, but you know, people complain about how fast things are changing and how hard it is to kind of keep up.

Harpreet: [00:30:57] And yes, 100

Andy: [00:30:59] Percent

Harpreet: [00:31:00] Agree, but you also

Andy: [00:31:01] Have to consider that what you're experiencing right

Harpreet: [00:31:03] Now is the

Andy: [00:31:04] Slowest rate of change you'll experience in your

Harpreet: [00:31:07] Lifetime. It's monotonically

Andy: [00:31:09] Increasing. It's just going to get worse or better. It's going to increase, you know, as we go along. And that's especially given the events of the last year or two. That's a very sobering thought because a lot of things have changed, especially with the pandemic. I love this idea that you know anyone who on their their, you know, 20 19 job performance, three reviews you know where you see yourself next year and what are you going to be doing the next year? It's like, yeah, flush it. That's all rubbish that all went out the window, right? None of that happened. It like, Oh, or we're going to do this instead.

Harpreet: [00:31:45] You know, but that

Andy: [00:31:46] Really, I mean, that was a very dramatic event. And it's I hate to say this, but this was the

Harpreet: [00:31:51] First pandemic of the century. It's not going to be the last one.

Andy: [00:31:55] You know, you talk to the virologists and the folks who study these things. It's like there is [00:32:00] a large class of these things that could easily

Harpreet: [00:32:02] Break out just like

Andy: [00:32:03] This one did. You've got, you know,

Harpreet: [00:32:05] We have such

Andy: [00:32:06] Wonderful, wonderful transportation with everyone mixing from all over the globe, bringing any bat virus from here to there. And this and that it's going to happen. So, you know, it's the first one, but I think it's way it's been a really good wake up

Harpreet: [00:32:20] Call to really point

Andy: [00:32:22] Out that change literally is

Harpreet: [00:32:24] Constant and you

Andy: [00:32:25] Have to be prepared for that. So, you know, a lot of the tips and the pragmatic programmer book and a lot of the background information and the thinking and learning book are really about how to deal with change, how to embrace change. I like to remind people, you know, when

Harpreet: [00:32:40] The whole agile movement

Andy: [00:32:42] Kind of started Kent Beck's first book on extreme programing, which I still recommend people read. The subtitle of that book was Embrace

Harpreet: [00:32:50] Change, Not Grit Your

Andy: [00:32:52] Teeth and put up with change, but embrace change. Harness it, use it as a competitive advantage. And, you know, after after everyone's been sort of beaten up over the last year with with so many unexpected changes, that's kind of a hard

Harpreet: [00:33:06] Kind of a hard pill

Andy: [00:33:07] To swallow.

Harpreet: [00:33:08] But that's the

Andy: [00:33:09] World.

Harpreet: [00:33:09] That's that's where we are. Speaking of pills to

Harpreet: [00:33:12] Swallow, like, you know, Alice in Wonderland, talk about the Red Queen effect, right? That's kind of what you're describing, right? Where you have to think

Harpreet: [00:33:19] It's just you have to keep running

Harpreet: [00:33:21] Just to

Harpreet: [00:33:21] Stay in place, right?

Harpreet: [00:33:23] Keep up, keep learning.

Harpreet: [00:33:24] Keep, keep upgrading your

Harpreet: [00:33:26] Skills to stay in place. I mean, I do this kind of every summer. I go back to the basics of my field, you know, math mathematician and statistician just to remind myself of concepts. But like, I hate textbooks. So I read books like this. I've got like the the manga guide to linear algebra and then the the cartoon guide to statistics just to just because I want that stuff to stay fresh in my mind. Mean, I'd love to get into some of these concepts that you talk about in pragmatic thinking and learning. This book is amazing. Everybody listening, please pick it up.

Harpreet: [00:33:58] This is a one of my favorite [00:34:00]

Harpreet: [00:34:00] Books, for sure.

Harpreet: [00:34:01] So let's start off

Harpreet: [00:34:03] Talking about what is expertize and why is it so difficult to

Harpreet: [00:34:08] Articulate? So a couple of concepts to unpack their expertize results

Andy: [00:34:15] From

Harpreet: [00:34:15] Experience. You have

Andy: [00:34:16] To

Harpreet: [00:34:16] Have done it and

Andy: [00:34:18] Done a lot of it. The more of it you do, the

Andy: [00:34:20] More expertize you build up.

Andy: [00:34:22] And what's actually happening

Harpreet: [00:34:24] Is you're strengthening

Andy: [00:34:25] Various neural connections in your brain. You're growing regions of the brain.

Harpreet: [00:34:30] You know, it's it's easy.

Andy: [00:34:31] It's easy for us to

Harpreet: [00:34:32] Forget what the brain and

Andy: [00:34:35] Consciousness in the mind really are all about and how they work. And interestingly, our concept

Harpreet: [00:34:41] Of mind sort of follows along

Andy: [00:34:44] With the technology of the world at

Harpreet: [00:34:47] The time. So, you know, way

Andy: [00:34:48] Back in the day, you know, it might have conceived of the mind and very, very naturalistic terms, you know, as a lion or a predator

Harpreet: [00:34:56] Or

Andy: [00:34:57] A wheat field or something like that. And then in the 19th century, it's like, well, the brain is like clockwork.

Harpreet: [00:35:02] It's very

Andy: [00:35:03] Mechanistic. It's a mechanical

Harpreet: [00:35:05] Process.

Andy: [00:35:06] And, you know, now it's kind of fashionable to think of it as a

Harpreet: [00:35:09] Computer, you know?

Andy: [00:35:10] Well, it's just the software you get to have it running on the hardware of the brain and this and that.

Harpreet: [00:35:15] And you know, none of those

Andy: [00:35:17] Models are really quite correct because the big part we leave out

Harpreet: [00:35:21] Is that if the brain is

Andy: [00:35:22] A machine, it's a self modifying

Harpreet: [00:35:25] Machine.

Andy: [00:35:25] It rewires itself constantly in in response to stimuli and usage patterns and this sort of thing. And that's a really profound thought. And you know, somewhere in the book, I talk about the research of Carol

Harpreet: [00:35:39] Dweck, who did this study that showed that if you

Andy: [00:35:42] Believe you can be a lifelong

Harpreet: [00:35:43] Learner and you can just

Andy: [00:35:45] Pick up new skills as you need them and go through a. Life, then, if you

Harpreet: [00:35:49] Believe that your brain

Andy: [00:35:51] Will rewire itself to make that

Harpreet: [00:35:53] Possible, if

Andy: [00:35:54] You are told in school that you're a dummy, that you can't ever learn anything that you're [00:36:00] not good at

Harpreet: [00:36:00] Math. Oh my God.

Andy: [00:36:02] You know, I'm not a violent person, but I would

Harpreet: [00:36:03] Shoot every

Andy: [00:36:04] Teacher who told some girl, Oh, girls aren't good at math. You don't need

Harpreet: [00:36:08] To study that right? Bullshit. Hundred percent legit

Andy: [00:36:12] Bullshit. The problem with that

Harpreet: [00:36:13] Is if if

Andy: [00:36:14] You've been

Harpreet: [00:36:15] Told by an

Andy: [00:36:16] Authority figure by a teacher that you can't learn something and then you believe it, then your brain wires

Harpreet: [00:36:22] Itself so that you're

Andy: [00:36:23] Not going to be able to learn it. It's a self modifying machine and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which, to me, it's criminal.

Harpreet: [00:36:31] It's absolutely criminal.

Andy: [00:36:32] So, you know, we've got the self modifying machine working there.

Harpreet: [00:36:36] And as

Andy: [00:36:37] You do

Harpreet: [00:36:38] Stuff, as

Andy: [00:36:39] You're working, learning, programing, learning, statistics, learning, mathematics, whatever it

Harpreet: [00:36:43] Might be, you

Andy: [00:36:44] Build up these different thought patterns. You strengthen these connections. So expertize becomes the sort of sum total

Harpreet: [00:36:52] Of discrete memory ways of

Andy: [00:36:54] Thinking, problem solving, different approaches to problem solving skills and both the conscious and the unconscious. And you know that just it makes

Harpreet: [00:37:04] This stew of

Andy: [00:37:05] Expertize. And so what happens is as you become

Harpreet: [00:37:08] Expert at something

Andy: [00:37:10] And you rely more on intuition and rely more on these non-conscious thought processes in the brain, you can arrive at a decision

Harpreet: [00:37:19] In an instant but

Andy: [00:37:20] Not have any way to backtrack

Harpreet: [00:37:23] And say, Well, how did I arrive at that?

Andy: [00:37:25] Know what bits of memory? You know what thread I follow through consciousness to arrive at that?

Harpreet: [00:37:31] No idea, right?

Andy: [00:37:32] And this happens your interviews with doctors. It's like, Well, that's wonderful. Diagnosis, Doctor, how did you determine that? Well, he didn't look right.

Harpreet: [00:37:39] She didn't look right. You know, what

Andy: [00:37:41] Does that mean? I don't know. It's just, you know, a firefighter. Well, you know, I didn't feel right going onto that floor.

Harpreet: [00:37:46] So we did this thing

Andy: [00:37:47] Instead and then the thing collapses. How did you

Harpreet: [00:37:49] Know? I don't know it. Just it felt wrong. And that's the interesting thing.

Andy: [00:37:54] So this is their intuition.

Harpreet: [00:37:56] Speaking from, you know, this this

Andy: [00:37:58] Complex, [00:38:00] self modifying mass of everything going on in your head. And it's usually

Harpreet: [00:38:05] Right built up from

Andy: [00:38:06] All this experience, from from pattern matching, from seeing similar things

Harpreet: [00:38:10] Before. But it's

Andy: [00:38:11] Definitely not something you can always be

Harpreet: [00:38:13] Articulate about. You know, you

Andy: [00:38:15] Just

Harpreet: [00:38:15] Know, and it

Harpreet: [00:38:16] Turns out that this expertize isn't binary on or off, right? It's more like a spectrum and you talk about the spectrum in the book as well, the Dreyfus model. Can you talk to us about what this is and and why is it important that we understand this Dreyfus model?

Harpreet: [00:38:31] So this was

Andy: [00:38:32] An interesting thing that my wife

Harpreet: [00:38:34] Actually came

Andy: [00:38:35] Across. She has a doctorate in

Harpreet: [00:38:37] Nursing and there

Andy: [00:38:39] Was a

Harpreet: [00:38:39] Popular book back.

Andy: [00:38:40] I think the first

Harpreet: [00:38:41] Edition came out late seventies

Andy: [00:38:43] Or early

Harpreet: [00:38:43] Eighties on from novice to expert

Andy: [00:38:46] Looking at,

Harpreet: [00:38:47] You know,

Andy: [00:38:48] How expertize works

Harpreet: [00:38:51] In the field and what you can do about it.

Andy: [00:38:53] And that drew on the research of the Dreyfus Brothers. The Dreyfus brothers wanted to

Harpreet: [00:38:58] Build an AI back in the day, and they wanted to

Andy: [00:39:02] Build an AI that would learn skills the same way

Harpreet: [00:39:05] That people learned skills. My problem

Andy: [00:39:07] Was no one had a good handle on how people actually

Harpreet: [00:39:10] Learn skills at the moment,

Andy: [00:39:11] So they kind of had to crack that nut first. And so they proposed this model that you go

Harpreet: [00:39:17] Through these sort

Andy: [00:39:18] Of, you know,

Harpreet: [00:39:19] Five different phases

Andy: [00:39:21] Or stages.

Harpreet: [00:39:22] And they're not they're not strict,

Andy: [00:39:24] You know, you don't go from one to the other over.

Harpreet: [00:39:26] It's a spectrum from novice to expert.

Andy: [00:39:28] So you start off

Harpreet: [00:39:29] As a novice with

Andy: [00:39:30] No experience, no expertize. You have to be given rules to follow to be effective.

Harpreet: [00:39:36] Do this when that happens, do this other thing. Ok, great.

Andy: [00:39:39] Then you move up to be an

Harpreet: [00:39:40] Advanced beginner where you can kind

Andy: [00:39:42] Of start to figure stuff out a little bit on your

Harpreet: [00:39:45] Own, but you still can't understand or

Andy: [00:39:48] Appreciate the big picture. Then you get

Harpreet: [00:39:50] Up to competent and that's where

Andy: [00:39:51] You know you're doing the stuff. You're able to do it, you're working with it. You still have

Harpreet: [00:39:55] To.

Andy: [00:39:56] You still struggle with some things, but but you can

Harpreet: [00:39:58] Get it done. Then you move

Andy: [00:39:59] Up to [00:40:00]

Harpreet: [00:40:00] Proficient, and that's where you start to get

Andy: [00:40:02] Into this kind of unconscious competence. You're doing it and you don't even

Harpreet: [00:40:05] Think about it. It's second nature. And then finally,

Andy: [00:40:08] You end up as an expert where you can teach others,

Harpreet: [00:40:11] You can share it. You rely on intuition instead of

Andy: [00:40:16] Relying on the

Harpreet: [00:40:16] Rules. You know you see

Andy: [00:40:18] Yourself as

Harpreet: [00:40:19] Part of the system, not as

Andy: [00:40:21] A discrete observer of the system,

Harpreet: [00:40:23] Which a novice would tend to

Andy: [00:40:24] Do. And that was one of the most interesting things I think about. The Dreyfus model was this notion that an expert is not

Harpreet: [00:40:30] Just a smarter novice,

Andy: [00:40:33] That you fundamentally change what kind of mental models you use. If you use mental models at all right novices

Harpreet: [00:40:41] Don't how you

Andy: [00:40:42] Problem solve how you move from this reliance on rules to intuition. How you. Appreciate systems

Harpreet: [00:40:48] Thinking that, you know,

Andy: [00:40:50] As an expert, you realize you're part of the system, you're not just a hired gun or off to the side, you're actually part of it or as a novice views. I'm here and the system is

Harpreet: [00:41:00] Over there and these are sort of different things and they're not. So, you know, this

Andy: [00:41:06] Whole, there's a number of different axes that change as you gain expertize and get

Harpreet: [00:41:12] Closer toward expert.

Andy: [00:41:14] Interestingly, in most

Harpreet: [00:41:16] Fields, most people

Andy: [00:41:17] Never get beyond advanced

Harpreet: [00:41:19] Beginner. They get to a point where it's kind of good enough and they stop, you know, and I think

Andy: [00:41:24] That's true in programing as well. You get someone who can slap a couple of libraries together and, you know, copy and paste some code to do what they need to do.

Harpreet: [00:41:32] And that's good enough. And there's nothing

Andy: [00:41:34] Wrong with that. You know, if that's all you need

Harpreet: [00:41:36] Dynamite, you know, awesome.

Andy: [00:41:38] You know, if you're trying to be a leader in your field and, you know, run a multimillion dollar operation or something, you probably need a little more than that.

Harpreet: [00:41:44] How can we objectively kind of look at ourselves, look at our skill set

Harpreet: [00:41:48] And, you know,

Harpreet: [00:41:49] Because

Harpreet: [00:41:49] You can have 10 years of

Harpreet: [00:41:51] Experience, but it's the

Harpreet: [00:41:52] Same one year of experience times nine, right? Or or it could

Harpreet: [00:41:57] Be progressively getting difficult. So what's a good way for us to kind [00:42:00] of accurately self assess where we

Harpreet: [00:42:01] Would fall on this spectrum?

Andy: [00:42:04] So interestingly, and there are some specific things and there's there's lists in the books of the characteristics that each of the level. So you can kind of look at that list and say, OK, this kind of sounds like me, you know, for

Harpreet: [00:42:16] Instance, if you're at

Andy: [00:42:17] The novice or advanced beginner phase, you don't really want the big picture. It's like when the VP of marketing or accounting comes in and gives an hour-long presentation and you're just screaming, Oh my God, this has nothing to

Harpreet: [00:42:28] Do with me.

Andy: [00:42:29] Yes, it's the big picture, but I don't care.

Harpreet: [00:42:31] This doesn't apply to me. That's an indication

Andy: [00:42:33] That

Harpreet: [00:42:34] For whatever that

Andy: [00:42:35] Topic area is,

Harpreet: [00:42:36] You're on one

Andy: [00:42:37] Of the more introductory levels, whereas the expert will be will

Harpreet: [00:42:40] Understand, Well, this is a

Andy: [00:42:42] System. And yes, this affects me and this is something I need to pay attention to.

Andy: [00:42:46] So, so sort of sort of things like that, being able to hone in on a specific problem

Harpreet: [00:42:50] Area, you know,

Andy: [00:42:52] If you if someone saying, Oh, I'm stuck on this bug, can you come and look at my screen? If you look at the screen and go right to the point, go, well, this looks

Harpreet: [00:42:59] Suspicious, then you've got more

Andy: [00:43:01] Expertize than not. If you start looking at everything and you don't know where you're looking for,

Harpreet: [00:43:05] Then you're on the more introductory novice end of things.

Andy: [00:43:09] So there's some specific things like that you can look at. But in general, there's a problem where being able to accurately self assess your own performance is something that really only comes in at the higher skill levels.

Harpreet: [00:43:22] You need to

Andy: [00:43:23] Be kind of at the

Harpreet: [00:43:23] Proficient level to be able

Andy: [00:43:25] To accurately self assess what you're doing. And this is where you get into, you know, like the Dunning Kruger effect, where when you're a novice, you're like, Oh, this is easy, I can do anything. I don't know why they make a fuss about it. And yeah, it ain't so. And there's a story in the book which I just absolutely love. It just cracks me up. It shouldn't. It's kind of evil of me to laugh at, but it's just wonderful. This this poor fellow goes in to rob

Harpreet: [00:43:49] A bank, broad daylight walks

Andy: [00:43:51] In and rob the bank, and it does his business

Harpreet: [00:43:53] And the cops follow

Andy: [00:43:55] Him home and arrest him. And he's he's dumbfounded. He's he's thunderstruck. How [00:44:00] on earth did you find me? They're like, Dude, you know, we saw you on the security cameras. You were right there. We followed you home. He's like, Well, you couldn't have seen me. I was wearing the juice. I'm sorry, sir.

Harpreet: [00:44:09] The what everyone

Andy: [00:44:11] Knows. If you put lemon juice on your face, you're invisible to security cameras, but don't bump.

Harpreet: [00:44:18] And you know,

Andy: [00:44:19] It's kind of funny to look at an incident like that. It's written up in the literature and the journals and say, Oh, you know this, this this poor fellow, you know, misunderstood. But you know that level

Harpreet: [00:44:30] Of falling for, you know,

Andy: [00:44:33] Kind of of old wives story or common, you know, memes on the internet. I mean, we're still doing that.

Harpreet: [00:44:41] You know, we've

Andy: [00:44:41] Got flat-Earthers, we've got people

Harpreet: [00:44:43] Who, you know,

Andy: [00:44:44] Believe the election was stolen or believe that the virus has microchips in it, that, you know, Bill Gates is going to control your mind and steal all your data. And they're posting this on Facebook, which has already done all of that. So it's kind of ironic, but you know, I don't get into that. But you know, when you're a novice at any particular subject, you know, whether it's computing or geopolitics or virology

Harpreet: [00:45:10] Or

Andy: [00:45:10] Astrophysics, you know, it's really easy to fall prey

Harpreet: [00:45:14] To misinformation

Andy: [00:45:16] Because you literally don't have the

Harpreet: [00:45:18] Expertize or the critical

Andy: [00:45:20] Thinking skills to know any better. So that

Harpreet: [00:45:23] Sounds inflammatory.

Andy: [00:45:25] I'll click on it. And there you go. And that's a real danger. We we don't really teach critical thinking

Harpreet: [00:45:32] Skills in school.

Andy: [00:45:33] We don't teach things like systems thinking. And there was an interesting conversation very recently. Like last week or two, somebody on Twitter posted that they were teaching their 11 year

Harpreet: [00:45:44] Old, you know, critical

Andy: [00:45:46] Thinking skills. And it was working, really. And they just had a conversation with a college professor saying, Oh, college kids are too young to teach that too. That has to be a post, you know, post-grad activity. And you know, I mean, that stuff makes me crazy. It's like, [00:46:00] you know, I've seen, you know, I've seen literally five and six year olds dancing around on an iPad, having no problem at all, navigating it and working stuff and even understanding

Harpreet: [00:46:09] That, Oh, mom

Andy: [00:46:10] Says I can only buy the apps that have five star

Harpreet: [00:46:13] Ratings because

Andy: [00:46:14] Those have been vetted, apparently, and it's popular. And I shouldn't buy the game that has one star and only a

Harpreet: [00:46:20] Few, you know,

Andy: [00:46:21] A few developers. You know, this could be a scam, but you find the six year olds

Harpreet: [00:46:25] Understand that, right?

Andy: [00:46:27] But we don't we don't teach

Andy: [00:46:28] That kind of

Harpreet: [00:46:29] Thinking.

Andy: [00:46:30] It's certainly not at a young age, and we absolutely need to for the century that we're in and the one that we're headed into. We have to have those skills at an early age

Harpreet: [00:46:39] Or things will fall

Andy: [00:46:41] Apart. And we'll end up like some science fiction story with the Eloi and the more locks. And you know, you've got a whole swath of the population who doesn't understand how the thing works. You know, I mean, there's a reason why science fiction paints these pictures because it's a possibility. It's it's in the cards there and we need to we need

Harpreet: [00:47:00] To fight that. That reminds me that everyone should take into

Harpreet: [00:47:03] Consideration the Royal Society's motto Nullius in

Harpreet: [00:47:07] Verba.

Harpreet: [00:47:08] Take no one's word for go and see for yourself. Figure it out. So in the book you also talk

Harpreet: [00:47:13] About, since

Harpreet: [00:47:14] We're talking

Harpreet: [00:47:14] About how through the ages,

Harpreet: [00:47:16] People are trying to conceptualize the mind in terms of whatever machine

Harpreet: [00:47:20] Is the

Harpreet: [00:47:21] Big machine of that era. And you talk

Harpreet: [00:47:24] About the dual

Harpreet: [00:47:25] Cpu kind of functionality of the mind of the brain.

Harpreet: [00:47:30] Talk to us about that. So this this was

Andy: [00:47:33] Again a lot to unpack

Harpreet: [00:47:34] In that idea. The the

Andy: [00:47:36] Old school of

Harpreet: [00:47:37] Thought was that you

Andy: [00:47:39] Had sort of left brain and right

Harpreet: [00:47:40] Brain thinking and folks

Andy: [00:47:42] Got Nobel Prizes on this and there's a lot of studies and whatnot. And it turned out that, of course, it's much more

Harpreet: [00:47:47] Complicated than that.

Andy: [00:47:49] And what we thought of as discrete hemispheres doing tasks are actually these different areas of network

Harpreet: [00:47:57] Activation that work

Andy: [00:47:58] In tandem. So it's almost like [00:48:00]

Harpreet: [00:48:00] Having, you know, a

Andy: [00:48:01] Clouds of lightning storms that are kind of hitting all over the brain and in certain patterns, certain sequences.

Harpreet: [00:48:07] You get one

Andy: [00:48:08] Particular style of

Harpreet: [00:48:09] Processing and these others

Andy: [00:48:11] Integrate for this other style

Harpreet: [00:48:13] Of processing.

Andy: [00:48:14] So conceptually, if you think of it as like two different

Harpreet: [00:48:18] Cpus, you've got this one

Andy: [00:48:21] Method of brain processing that's very much like a classical von Neumann processor and executes instructions

Harpreet: [00:48:28] Step by step in order. It's pretty slow. It operates

Andy: [00:48:32] At about one hundred and ten

Harpreet: [00:48:33] Board. You know, like

Andy: [00:48:34] The old acoustic coupler, it's about the speed of

Harpreet: [00:48:36] Speech, and that's how it works.

Andy: [00:48:38] That CPU also has like an

Harpreet: [00:48:40] Idle loop, so if it's not being

Andy: [00:48:41] Used, it just sits there and does the monkey chatter, which all the yoga and meditation tries to quiet down. Well, that's where it comes from. It's this CPU. No one

Harpreet: [00:48:50] Very linear in order CPU number two is not like

Andy: [00:48:55] That. It's asynchronous.

Harpreet: [00:48:56] It's more

Andy: [00:48:57] Like a magical

Harpreet: [00:48:58] Pattern matching

Andy: [00:49:00] Engine, like a signal processor or GPU or something like that. It will do searches in the background. So if I ask some some trivia question, it'll it'll. Oh, I don't know, but it'll sit there and work on it asynchronously. And then the next day in the shower, mowing the yard or something that pops into your head. Oh, you know, it was so and so that's because this asynchronous process was sitting there chunking away.

Harpreet: [00:49:25] And a lot of the things

Andy: [00:49:27] That we ascribe to sort of creative thinking that that sort of

Harpreet: [00:49:30] Our mode right

Andy: [00:49:31] Brain kind of thinking are this second

Harpreet: [00:49:35] Cpu asynchronous

Andy: [00:49:37] Thought processes.

Harpreet: [00:49:38] And there

Andy: [00:49:40] It's a little slippery because these are non-conscious

Harpreet: [00:49:43] Processes. They're not synchronous processes. So it's a little

Andy: [00:49:48] Harder to try to harvest

Harpreet: [00:49:50] Ideas that are coming up to

Andy: [00:49:52] You that

Harpreet: [00:49:52] Way.

Andy: [00:49:53] But this is what really creative people are able to tap into and able to do. And we're at a bit [00:50:00] of a disadvantage

Harpreet: [00:50:01] Because depending

Andy: [00:50:02] On your activity, like, for instance, if I'm sitting typing

Harpreet: [00:50:05] At a keyboard, I'm focused

Andy: [00:50:06] On symbolic representation. I'm punching letters and a lot of curly braces and semicolons, and I'm watching these symbols on the screen. And that very

Harpreet: [00:50:15] Action kind of

Andy: [00:50:17] Hogs the bus, if you will, you know, keeping with the computer metaphor into the CPU one or L mode kind of processing, and it shuts

Harpreet: [00:50:25] Off the creative mode.

Andy: [00:50:27] And that's why, you know, people say, you know, if I'm stuck on a problem, what's what can I do? The number one thing you can do is stand up and step away from

Harpreet: [00:50:35] The keyboard, go for a walk,

Andy: [00:50:37] Get get away from symbols and don't think about the problem specifically. Just kind of don't think about anything.

Harpreet: [00:50:44] And you know, this

Andy: [00:50:45] Happens to, you know, coders all the time. What you're stuck

Harpreet: [00:50:48] On a bug, you get up, you

Andy: [00:50:49] Walk to the restroom, you go out to your car or whatever, and you're halfway there and oh, I know what it is, right? It pops into your head and that's exactly how that sort of mechanism works.

Harpreet: [00:51:00] So that's kind of how

Andy: [00:51:02] How these two things are and how it sort of relates

Harpreet: [00:51:05] To what's

Andy: [00:51:06] Historically thought of as right brain and left brain, even though that's not an accurate term, it's areas of activation

Harpreet: [00:51:12] Energy. But we do

Andy: [00:51:14] Have different processes that are better for different things. And a lot of what's in the pragmatic thinking and learning book are different kind of tips and techniques to try to harvest

Harpreet: [00:51:25] These kind of, you know,

Andy: [00:51:27] Non-conscious asynchronous ideas. You know how to break that lock that symbolic mode lock

Harpreet: [00:51:34] And free up more resources.

Andy: [00:51:36] Stepping away from the keyboard is

Harpreet: [00:51:38] A great a great start. But then so you're out,

Andy: [00:51:41] You're out in nature, you're you're on a hike, you're in the car or whatever. And that's when the idea pops in.

Harpreet: [00:51:47] And this is this is

Andy: [00:51:47] The kind of funny problem, because now you're not at the keyboard and you've got this

Harpreet: [00:51:51] Great idea, you wake up in

Andy: [00:51:52] The middle of the night, Oh, I solved the bug. I've got a great idea for my

Harpreet: [00:51:56] Play, my my music,

Andy: [00:51:57] Whatever.

Harpreet: [00:51:58] I'll remember it in the morning. [00:52:00] No, you won't.

Andy: [00:52:00] You know, you won't. It doesn't. I wish. I wish, right? You know, I've written whole symphonies in my head and I wake up, Oh, that's brilliant. I don't remember a damn thing about it when I wake up in the morning. So one really powerful notion is that you need to capture these ideas as soon

Harpreet: [00:52:19] As you have them. So always

Andy: [00:52:20] Carry something on you, whether it's a little miniature pencil and a couple of pieces of paper or note

Harpreet: [00:52:25] Cards or

Andy: [00:52:27] Something, you know, probably not your phone where

Harpreet: [00:52:29] You have to type, you know, maybe

Andy: [00:52:31] Call your voicemail, leave yourself a message or dictate into a dictation app.

Harpreet: [00:52:35] But there's there's

Andy: [00:52:37] Mechanisms because the brain's a self modifying machine. If you

Harpreet: [00:52:40] Get into the habit of capturing

Andy: [00:52:42] Every idea that you think is relevant, even if it turns out not to be. But if you get into

Harpreet: [00:52:46] That habit of capturing everything,

Andy: [00:52:48] Your brain's like, Oh, you need more ideas like that?

Harpreet: [00:52:52] Here you go, boss. And it'll start

Andy: [00:52:54] Giving you more ideas and more creativity if you don't do

Harpreet: [00:52:58] That, and it's like, Why bother, you know?

Andy: [00:53:01] And some little man in your brain says it's going to go to the back of your head and go watch old episodes of lost or something. You know, it's just not helpful. So, yeah, you need

Harpreet: [00:53:09] Something to capture

Andy: [00:53:11] These

Harpreet: [00:53:11] Ideas all the time

Andy: [00:53:13] As as as you're going through.

Harpreet: [00:53:14] And a lot of

Andy: [00:53:15] Folks have written in to say when they started doing

Harpreet: [00:53:17] That or any of the

Andy: [00:53:18] Other, you know, sort of more formal tips in the book

Harpreet: [00:53:21] That they notice

Andy: [00:53:22] A difference. It's like, you know, they get stumped. Less often, things come to them.

Harpreet: [00:53:26] Breakthroughs, insights come to them more readily.

Andy: [00:53:30] And that's I mean, that's an amazingly powerful thing.

Harpreet: [00:53:32] Yeah.

Harpreet: [00:53:33] Think about that story. You're talking about the top

Harpreet: [00:53:35] Of the hour where the guy

Harpreet: [00:53:37] Who'd grown up be mowing the lawn and all of a sudden just run inside and go write something

Harpreet: [00:53:41] Down. That's kind of the

Harpreet: [00:53:43] The R mode kind of being activated there. I think that's like the

Harpreet: [00:53:46] I don't know if it's like the default mode

Harpreet: [00:53:48] Network. I don't know what the brain science name for that is, but that's it's interesting that that happens. You also talked about in the book. I mean, you talk about so many awesome things in the book that I wouldn't expect somebody in [00:54:00] tech to

Harpreet: [00:54:00] Kind of read

Harpreet: [00:54:01] About or know about, right? Like, for example, morning pages. That's something I do every morning. Julia Cameron morning pages. I mean, even before I'd read pragmatic thinking, learning already had red hair,

Harpreet: [00:54:12] Brain tortoise

Harpreet: [00:54:13] Mind, and a lot of the books that you reference from even press field.

Harpreet: [00:54:17] So how was it

Harpreet: [00:54:18] That you got interested in these type of books and how have they helped you and your

Harpreet: [00:54:24] Journey? Well, it's

Andy: [00:54:25] It's it's

Harpreet: [00:54:25] Interesting. I don't

Andy: [00:54:27] Know. I kind of stumble on these sort of interesting books by by roundabout ways.

Harpreet: [00:54:33] So, you know, I

Andy: [00:54:35] Think I came across the Cameron book when I was looking at resources on writing and trying to teach other people to write well. So with our pragmatic bookshelf

Harpreet: [00:54:45] Publishing, you know, a lot of what we

Andy: [00:54:46] Have to do is

Harpreet: [00:54:48] Teach subject matter

Andy: [00:54:50] Experts how to write

Harpreet: [00:54:51] Effectively because you know,

Andy: [00:54:52] You might be an expert on rust or elixir or Data science or AI or whatever. That's absolutely no guarantee that you can write your way out of a paper bag, right? It's a different skill set. So this is another thing about Dreyfus. It's per skill. You might be an expert, data scientist and a novice author.

Harpreet: [00:55:09] Right. That happens. So, you know, we went

Andy: [00:55:11] Through some research of, OK, how can

Harpreet: [00:55:13] We help

Andy: [00:55:15] Folks? And you know, what we really do are development editors.

Harpreet: [00:55:18] A lot of what they do

Andy: [00:55:19] Is

Harpreet: [00:55:19] Train new

Andy: [00:55:21] Authors to to write better and to get the book out the door. So some stuff I came

Harpreet: [00:55:26] Across from that, like

Andy: [00:55:27] Like the Cameron work, I came while looking for

Andy: [00:55:29] Resources to help

Andy: [00:55:30] Authors a lot of stuff. When I was, you know, I gave talks on the pragmatic thinking and learning book for maybe five

Harpreet: [00:55:36] Years before I

Andy: [00:55:37] Actually sat down and wrote

Harpreet: [00:55:38] The book. And you know, when

Andy: [00:55:40] You're when you're looking into a

Harpreet: [00:55:42] Subject, every

Andy: [00:55:44] Every resource you look at, every book you

Harpreet: [00:55:46] Read.

Andy: [00:55:47] Opens up a gateway to a couple of other books and a couple of other notions, and it starts to feed on itself. And there's actually I talk about this in the book,

Harpreet: [00:55:55] There's ways

Andy: [00:55:57] The reasons that that actually works your brain, you [00:56:00] know, it's related to sense tuning. Once you start looking into a subject, you start

Harpreet: [00:56:03] Noticing more of

Andy: [00:56:04] That subject. So, you know, the random stumbling on these other resources wasn't so random.

Harpreet: [00:56:10] You know, I was looking

Andy: [00:56:11] At researching things in this area and oh, this pops up and this guy has a footnote to this and this reference is this other

Harpreet: [00:56:17] Thing. And you know,

Andy: [00:56:18] You start going down the rabbit hole and stuff pops out like, Wow, that's really interesting. Or in the case of this book, I would

Harpreet: [00:56:24] Find very

Andy: [00:56:26] Similar

Harpreet: [00:56:27] Ideas in wildly

Andy: [00:56:28] Different

Harpreet: [00:56:29] Areas.

Andy: [00:56:29] So here's a book on meditation, which is saying the same thing as this MBA courses is saying, which is the same thing that Julia Cameron is recommending, which is the same, you know, somewhere over here.

Harpreet: [00:56:39] And you know, that struck a chord.

Andy: [00:56:41] It's like, OK, why don't you start

Harpreet: [00:56:42] Finding

Andy: [00:56:43] Similar ideas, similar notions spread across different fields? Then odds are they're on to something.

Harpreet: [00:56:51] And this is probably

Andy: [00:56:52] More of a human universal that bears investigating. But and in some of it is is just random luck.

Harpreet: [00:56:59] You know, you're talking

Andy: [00:57:00] To a friend and they, Oh, I read this great book, you should read it and you look at it, but you have to read for that to happen. You know, if you're Elon Musk and you're reading five

Harpreet: [00:57:07] Books a night, you know, maybe 80

Andy: [00:57:09] Percent of them

Harpreet: [00:57:10] Are rubbish. Maybe it's

Andy: [00:57:12] A book on, you know, South America economic theory

Harpreet: [00:57:14] That you'll never use

Andy: [00:57:16] Or won't be relevant. And maybe it will be exactly that missing piece of the puzzle that you've been looking for. But if you don't read any books, you have

Harpreet: [00:57:24] No chance you're not going to get anything. If you read a ton, you know, most

Andy: [00:57:28] All of it's going to be useful one

Harpreet: [00:57:30] Way or another. Yeah, it's one thing I love

Harpreet: [00:57:31] About the podcast is that it really gives me an opportunity to speak

Harpreet: [00:57:35] To authors.

Harpreet: [00:57:36] But then in order to have a good conversation with them, I need to read their books. And as I read their books, I'll go to the references and pick up some other books. So from your book, Whack on the side of the Head is one that I picked up. This is a really good one. I got another one on the bookshelf sitting there. It's how to solve it. So I'm excited to get into that one.

Harpreet: [00:57:52] So if you

Harpreet: [00:57:53] Think about it, like if your brain

Harpreet: [00:57:54] Is a is a computer and

Harpreet: [00:57:56] We can say that maybe your belief system is like [00:58:00] the software operating

Harpreet: [00:58:02] System that runs on it, picking up new

Harpreet: [00:58:04] Books could be like software updates. Little, little

Harpreet: [00:58:07] Patches, right? Absolutely. So we'll do it last

Harpreet: [00:58:10] Formal question before we jump into a real quick. What I like to call the random round here. So it's one hundred

Harpreet: [00:58:16] Years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

Andy: [00:58:20] I'd like to think that people would remember that I was able to help people. I get

Harpreet: [00:58:25] Fan mail literally

Andy: [00:58:26] All the time from folks say I was

Harpreet: [00:58:28] Instrumental in

Andy: [00:58:29] Launching their career and furthering their career and pivoting their career that I changed the course of their life.

Harpreet: [00:58:35] And it's

Andy: [00:58:36] Really

Harpreet: [00:58:37] Humbling to get

Andy: [00:58:38] That and

Harpreet: [00:58:38] Realize that, you know you're sitting

Andy: [00:58:40] Here in your office, you know, kind of isolated alone, just churning out thoughts and words. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of books get sold and and people are like, Wow, you know, you made my career

Harpreet: [00:58:52] What it is. You know, you change this.

Andy: [00:58:53] You affected that. And that's that's really remarkable. And I really do consider myself very

Harpreet: [00:58:59] Lucky to be in that position that, you know, I can

Andy: [00:59:03] Research and find interesting things

Harpreet: [00:59:05] And people find it helpful. Find it useful. Interestingly, we've already got a

Andy: [00:59:10] Plaque in Snowbird, Utah for The Agile Manifesto. There's a plaque up on the wall saying, you know, this was the room where everyone got together and wrote the manifesto. So yeah, I'm already on a plaque. So that's that's a start. That's the thing. But I'd also like to be remembered, you know, as someone who wasn't afraid to experiment, to try things, I write the software books. Yes. And as you mentioned, I also write science fiction thrillers. I enjoy writing and recording music in several styles, not just the the ambient and electronic the jazz. You know, I play trumpet and flugelhorn, so I do a lot of jazz and brass stuff. I did an album of

Harpreet: [00:59:47] Progressive Rock the year before

Andy: [00:59:49] That, which was, I really enjoy that. That's a fun

Harpreet: [00:59:52] Thing. I have a woodworking shop

Andy: [00:59:54] To get away from all the tech and experience a very different sort of problem solving. And [01:00:00] I think that's important. I think everyone should be well-rounded and should try different things.

Harpreet: [01:00:05] And if I can

Andy: [01:00:06] Lead by

Harpreet: [01:00:06] Example and do that,

Andy: [01:00:08] That'd be a great thing to

Harpreet: [01:00:09] Be remembered for. Absolutely love

Harpreet: [01:00:11] That. And trust

Harpreet: [01:00:12] Me, it is us that

Harpreet: [01:00:13] Is lucky to have

Harpreet: [01:00:14] You where you are churning

Harpreet: [01:00:16] Out these great books. So let's jump into a real quick random round here.

Harpreet: [01:00:20] Actually, before we do that. Talk to just real, real quick about

Harpreet: [01:00:23] This Grove's method that you're working on. I saw this on your website, but I haven't got a chance to dig into it too much. Real quick at a high level,

Harpreet: [01:00:29] What is this? So the growth

Andy: [01:00:31] Method is tries to be my answer to where the agile movement went

Harpreet: [01:00:36] Wrong. And part of the

Andy: [01:00:38] Reason that the agile

Harpreet: [01:00:39] Movement went wrong was when we did the manifesto. These were very

Andy: [01:00:44] High level abstract

Harpreet: [01:00:46] Concepts. And that's great, and if you're an

Andy: [01:00:48] Expert, if you're proficient, if you're high up on the Dreyfus

Harpreet: [01:00:51] Model, you

Andy: [01:00:52] Can understand and apply these sort of abstract generative principles, but everyone else

Harpreet: [01:00:57] Can't.

Andy: [01:00:58] They need very concrete rules to follow.

Harpreet: [01:01:01] And so Scrum became very

Andy: [01:01:03] Popular because, well, here's the rules is you just do

Harpreet: [01:01:05] This. And the problem

Andy: [01:01:07] Is when you when you're in office, when you're just following the rules that limits you to

Harpreet: [01:01:12] Novice levels of performance, you can't grow beyond that. So what

Andy: [01:01:17] You really need is more of a progression of

Harpreet: [01:01:20] Starting with the rules.

Andy: [01:01:22] Working up to recipes would have more judgment involved. So rules

Harpreet: [01:01:26] Say, you know, cook this for

Andy: [01:01:28] 20 minutes

Harpreet: [01:01:28] At three 50 recipes,

Andy: [01:01:30] Says Cook.

Harpreet: [01:01:30] Until done, and now there's some judgment.

Andy: [01:01:32] Well, what this done mean, and here's some ways to test for it and think about it and whatnot and

Harpreet: [01:01:37] Up to, you know,

Andy: [01:01:38] More abstract principles.

Harpreet: [01:01:40] So Grose

Andy: [01:01:41] Is kind of a post agile meta

Harpreet: [01:01:44] Method. I want to take

Andy: [01:01:45] The ideas and lessons from the thinking and learning book and fuze them with modern

Harpreet: [01:01:49] Sicced.

Andy: [01:01:50] So there's a lot about

Harpreet: [01:01:52] Learning and feedback.

Andy: [01:01:53] Experiments are first

Harpreet: [01:01:55] Class part of the method, right?

Andy: [01:01:56] You have to do experiments, you have to do. You have to do three things. [01:02:00] There's a three track attack is one of the one of the practices you have to

Harpreet: [01:02:03] Deliver the software your

Andy: [01:02:05] Is responsible for, obviously, but you also

Harpreet: [01:02:08] Have to revise

Andy: [01:02:10] How you're doing it. You have to actually adapt what the

Harpreet: [01:02:13] Team's process is, possibly, and

Andy: [01:02:15] You have to invest in researching the new tech. You have to invest in

Harpreet: [01:02:19] Learning, you know,

Andy: [01:02:20] What are we going to do for the next, you know, the next release of this or we can use the same toolset. Are we going to upgrade this or are we going to change our architecture? Or are we going to embrace microservices? Or are we going to flee from microservices? Or are we going to do you know, what are

Harpreet: [01:02:33] We going to do?

Andy: [01:02:34] And the problem is, most teams are so busy delivering.

Harpreet: [01:02:38] They don't have

Andy: [01:02:38] Time for discovery and they don't have time for

Harpreet: [01:02:40] Refinement. So they end up

Andy: [01:02:42] Being stuck

Harpreet: [01:02:43] Doing half of scrum badly and changes

Andy: [01:02:46] Whack them in the face like a wet fish because they're not prepared for it. They didn't get to experiment to try it. And, you know, too much of the time, it's like,

Harpreet: [01:02:54] Well, should we use this

Andy: [01:02:56] Or that? And I'll get asked this in interviews, should we use this tech or that tech? I have no

Harpreet: [01:03:00] Idea. I don't know what your context is.

Andy: [01:03:02] I don't know what the skill level of your team is. There's no way I can

Harpreet: [01:03:05] Advise you that you should or

Andy: [01:03:07] Shouldn't do anything. In particular, you need to determine that for yourself.

Harpreet: [01:03:11] You need to experiment with it, get the

Andy: [01:03:13] Results, make small changes, get the feedback and work with it. So a lot of the notions and grows are how do you do that effectively? And it's one thing to wave your hands and say, yes, you should experiment.

Harpreet: [01:03:25] But how? How do we

Andy: [01:03:26] Actually do that? So that's what we kind of try to get to

Harpreet: [01:03:30] Is, you know, try to promote these tools

Andy: [01:03:33] For

Harpreet: [01:03:34] Thinking and working

Andy: [01:03:35] In complex adaptive

Harpreet: [01:03:37] Environments because that at

Andy: [01:03:38] The bottom line, you know, going back to these bureaucratic organizations that are assuming a very linear model,

Harpreet: [01:03:44] It doesn't work, you know, by

Andy: [01:03:46] Systems thinking the environments we find ourselves in. These aren't linear environments. They're complex adaptive environments, and you

Harpreet: [01:03:53] Need the right tools to work with that. And you know,

Andy: [01:03:56] Other folks are discovering this, too. There's a whole beyond budgeting movement [01:04:00] where they're realizing

Harpreet: [01:04:01] That if

Andy: [01:04:02] You know, oh, we're incremental, we're iterative, we use scrum and we have annual

Harpreet: [01:04:07] Budgets. Well, now you're not agile, that's the wrong

Andy: [01:04:10] Way to do it. There's other

Harpreet: [01:04:11] Ways of achieving

Andy: [01:04:12] That that are more agile and are better for the business, and there's a whole burgeoning movement that talks exactly about that.

Harpreet: [01:04:19] So, yeah, it's all about how can

Andy: [01:04:21] We use better the right tool for the job? Complex adaptive tools instead of traditional linear tools?

Harpreet: [01:04:27] Definitely. You'd have to dig a little bit deeper into that. That sounds exactly like what data scientists need, right? We need to be able to operate. Not for me, step by step printout out, but we need to operate with a compass, not a map. We'll do a few rapid fire questions

Harpreet: [01:04:40] Here from the Random

Harpreet: [01:04:42] Question generator. Hopefully, you're able to see that on my screen here. First question here is what

Harpreet: [01:04:47] Makes you cry. Oh, that's a good one. I say when the

Andy: [01:04:50] Dog dies in the movie, maybe we took the kids to see Marley and me when they were little and we didn't

Harpreet: [01:04:56] Know that, you know? And not only

Andy: [01:04:58] Does the dog die, they spend like forty five minutes watching the damn dog

Harpreet: [01:05:03] Die. And you know, you're stuck

Andy: [01:05:04] There with your kids who you're trying to shield and protect from the sort of harsh realities when they're five or six or whatever. So, yeah, I'd say Marley Marley was the dog, right? Yeah. Marley frickin Marley made me cry. Absolutely.

Harpreet: [01:05:20] What fictional place would you most like to go to?

Andy: [01:05:24] I'm going to go with the cliché and say the bridge of the enterprise.

Harpreet: [01:05:28] All right. Nice, nice. The last one here.

Harpreet: [01:05:30] What incredibly strong opinion do you have that is completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Harpreet: [01:05:37] I detest rap music. And no one cares.

Andy: [01:05:41] Literally, nobody cares that I hate rap music. It's like, And that's fine.

Harpreet: [01:05:46] You know, and I.

Andy: [01:05:47] I can wax poetic about the reasons for it, it's like, well, music is all about melody and harmonic motion, and

Harpreet: [01:05:52] Rand rhythm and rhythm is

Andy: [01:05:54] Great. I get I love rhythm rhythms. Fantastic, but you need you need melody on top of it and musical styles [01:06:00] that don't

Harpreet: [01:06:00] Have melody or have a

Andy: [01:06:03] Very mundane, boring melody like like Gregorian chant. I'm not not a fan of sort of the opposite reason. You know, I like I like all the components of music

Harpreet: [01:06:12] To be there, you know, harmony

Andy: [01:06:14] And melody and rhythm and harmonic motion and development. And, you know, that sort of thing.

Harpreet: [01:06:19] And literally nobody

Andy: [01:06:21] Cares that I

Harpreet: [01:06:22] Think that

Harpreet: [01:06:23] What do you what are you listening to right now? What do you have on kind of repeat?

Harpreet: [01:06:27] Well, it's

Andy: [01:06:28] Funny.

Harpreet: [01:06:29] You know, a

Andy: [01:06:29] Lot of people put songs on repeat. That's actually not how I listen to music. I put on

Harpreet: [01:06:34] Albums, you know, even in

Andy: [01:06:35] Spotify, even on my my player, you know, I will cue up an album and listen to it start to finish.

Harpreet: [01:06:42] So, you know, I

Andy: [01:06:43] Like artists who put in the effort to make an

Harpreet: [01:06:46] Album, not just a

Andy: [01:06:48] Set of songs. So I like a lot of Stephen

Harpreet: [01:06:51] Wilson's work with Porcupine

Andy: [01:06:52] Tree and his solo albums. Obviously, you know, classic rock, Pink Floyd, huge, huge void and Dave Gilmore fan because again, these are sort of longer excursions roach on on the ambient front,

Harpreet: [01:07:06] Folks like that. But, you know,

Andy: [01:07:09] I'm not a huge fan of sort of the three minute, 30

Harpreet: [01:07:12] Second pop song. I mean, it has its place

Andy: [01:07:14] And there's there's some I love, you know, they're fine, but you know, especially if I'm sitting down for a long thinking

Harpreet: [01:07:21] Session, I'll put on a

Andy: [01:07:23] Steely Dan album, I'll put on a Pink Floyd album.

Harpreet: [01:07:25] I want that sort of longer experience.

Andy: [01:07:28] You know, it's more like like watching a

Harpreet: [01:07:30] Movie rather than,

Andy: [01:07:32] You know, a couple of short commercials kind of thing. And I do have I have

Harpreet: [01:07:35] Different music

Andy: [01:07:36] For different tasks.

Harpreet: [01:07:38] So if I'm

Andy: [01:07:39] Writing fiction novel, I like

Harpreet: [01:07:41] To put on something

Andy: [01:07:43] That's not very intrusive, something more like it, like ambient.

Harpreet: [01:07:46] Or maybe some, you know, cocktail jazz level

Andy: [01:07:50] Kind of stuff. Other activities I'll

Harpreet: [01:07:52] Put on LED Zeppelin

Andy: [01:07:53] Or something, you know, sort of classic heavy metal kind of deal programing. Steely Dan, big favorite

Harpreet: [01:08:00] Because [01:08:00] it's it's sort

Andy: [01:08:01] Of there's an interesting thing there if you get something that's sort of complex enough, but you know it

Harpreet: [01:08:05] Well, it helps

Andy: [01:08:06] Detract. It's almost like meditation. It takes

Harpreet: [01:08:09] That that L mode and

Andy: [01:08:10] Gives it something

Harpreet: [01:08:11] To do its singing

Andy: [01:08:12] Along, you know, following along with with the music and freeing up the rest of your brain to actually get some work done. So but it's it's a very fine line. You need something that you

Harpreet: [01:08:20] Know well, if it's not

Andy: [01:08:22] Like the worst thing to do is put like, you know, Spotify on shuffle on greatest hits of the X Y Z decade and and now you're paying attention to it. And that's impossible. I can't work with that. With that going on. It's a complex subject.

Harpreet: [01:08:36] Yeah, no, I know exactly exactly what you mean, and I'll be sure to link to your websites and your contact information on the socials in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking time out your schedule to come on to the show today. I really appreciate having you here.

Andy: [01:08:49] Thanks so much for having me.