The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming

Jessica Kerr https://medium.com/the-composition/the-origins-of-opera-and-the-future-of-programming-bcdaf8fbe960

Big idea: When developers form a great team, the team makes us into great developers.

Symmathesy - A learning system composed of learning parts

Our environment learns and adapts because we change it.

My team includes the people I work with, and also the software itself. And the servers it runs on, the databases it uses, and all the tools that we use to interact with the running software: the code, version control, automated tests, deployment scripts, logging.

The scope of the system we can hold in our head is the portion of the system we can change.

This mental model is incomplete, because everyone else is also changing it. We have to pay a penalty to reconcile our version of the world with someone else - this is communication.

Downhill invention, Uphill Analysis

It’s easier to build a system from scratch than form a fully formed mental model of an existing system. Aha - thus the superpower of consultants

It’s not necessarily faster, but it’s always easier to build your own model from scratch.

The mental models we hoard make us look good

Thus the dilemma I see - I can’t be a “master” developer because I don’t want to hoard anything. I want to take in everyone’s input and help it grow, but I don’t want solitary genius

How do you practice symmathesy, consciously?