Train Your Brain Like an AI & Read Code More Quickly

This channel is all about software development, so why am I telling you about AIs and leopards?
Well, one situation I face often is when I’m presented with a large amount of code, often thousands of lines of legacy code, that I need to make sense of quickly.

In this video I explain and demonstrate a technique that will help with that. Train like an AI!
Contribution: Llewellyn Falco

▬ Links ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Llewellyn Falco explaining and demonstrating Sparrow Deck at Agile Latvia Developer Conference ➡️

Inspiration from Kathy Sierra's keynote - "Making Badass Developers" ➡️


Emily on social media

▬ Video chapters ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
00:00 - Introduction
00:52 - Emily Explains: Train like an AI using "Sparrow Decks"
01:37 - Finding the Code Smell
05:11 - Explaining the exercise
06:15 - Exercise: House or Song Sparrow?
10:05 - Closing words

[nicolascarlo]

It's an excellent and barely known approach to learning complex things.

I've come across this as "Perceptual Exposure" from Kathy Sierra's book "Badass: Making Users Awesome". It turns out that experts have a hard time explaining how they know something — they can "feel" it. Thus, you would train people by exposing them to quality examples, asking them to make a call, and then revealing the correct answer. Just like the Sparrow Deck: people quickly start to get a sense of what's good or not.

E.g. showing 40 different short excerpts of high-quality talks to train yourself to improve public speaking skills.

Experts see patterns. I believe being exposed to quality examples of code smell can help developers build their spider sense of "this is wrong, we should try this refactoring move" when they get into actual codebases, where everything is mixed. Dr. Felienne Hermans also writes a bit about that in "The Programmer's Brain".

Llewellyn Falco's presentation was the only example I'm aware of this practice applied to programming.
Thank you for this video, it will be a helpful reference!

[JeffMillerPlusHat]

Shared with a code intensive group. A nice exercise!

[ronheywood]

This is good, have you read “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman?
It talks a lot about how brains use pattern matching.