Learnings - November 2019

A continued streak of excellent sci-fi novels, and a significant increase in productivity.

Articles

• Harnessing the Power of Shower Thoughts
  • tl;dr: Alternate periods of focus with periods of slack (sleep, walk, swim, shower, daydream), which allow your mind to assimilate the information and gain insight.
• Salary Negotiation
• 5 Things I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Programming
  • tl;dr: Don’t duplicate knowledge, write no more code than is necessary, verify pearls of wisdom from seniors, TDD is great, use evidence in code reviews
• Don’t Teach Code; Solicit Predictions Instead
  • tl;dr: Use inversion i.e. present valid, coherent, possibly real-world examples; ask them to (try to) comprehend, appreciate and predict the outcome; then explain and define concepts.

Python

• Use doctest to write simple lightweight tests for small short functions. It also provides legit examples in the docstrings itself
• Use pytest which is much faster to write than Python’s built-in unittest