A little while ago a friend of mine shared this list of Talks that changed the way I think about programming in one of the many Slacks I’m in and I finally started watching them.
Here’s my recap of one of the talks from that list, Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey. In it he describes his process for solving hard problems, which is obviously a huge part of what programmers do and is probably useful for just about anyone else too. There are a couple of technical examples in the talk but almost all of it should make sense to a non-programmer.
I put numbers on these steps to make this blog post easier to follow, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow this process in this exact order. The first couple of steps really do need to happen first, but after that you may want to iterate over the remaining steps a few times and possibly even go back to the beginning to make sure that you really do understand your problem in the context of all the new stuff you’ve learned while you were trying to solve it.
Step 1: state the problem. Say it out loud, talk with team member about it, write it down if nothing else.
Step 2: understand the problem. What do you know already (facts, context, constraints)? What don’t you know? For example, if you know you will need input data, where does it come from? if the primary source goes down, is there a secondary? Are there related problems? Hint: there are. Your problem is almost certainly not unique in the history of the world. And if you’re going to bother to figure all that stuff out, write it down!
Step 3: be discerning. Not everything is awesome! Look for problems in your proposed solutions and try to solve those too right away up front. Do you think there aren’t any tradeoffs in your proposed solution? Not likely, it’s much more likely you’re missing something. You should have questions – nobody knows everything! If you don’t have questions, you’re missing something. Write all this stuff down too.
Step 4: more input better output. You can’t connect things you don’t know about. Read in and around your space (not just your exact problem, also similar stuff so that you can let that simmer and let your brain make connections). Look (critically!) at other solutions too. Great solutions can come from tearing apart someone else’s idea.
Step 5: tradeoffs. Everybody says design is about tradeoffs, but you need to look at at least two possible solutions and figure out what’s good and bad about those things before you can really say you made a tradeoff. Write this down too! You may be seeing a theme here :)
Step 6: focus. This is where the hammock comes in. One of the great things about the hammock is that if you lie down with your eyes closed, no one knows you’re not sleeping and they won’t bother you because you might be sleeping so you can focus completely on your problem without interruptions. The computer is a prime source of distractions – you need to get away from the computer if you want to focus. You can’t do everything – if you really focus on something you’ll drop other balls like returning phone calls or emails, or remembering to run that errand or fix that bug you said would be really quick. Let your loved ones know what you’re doing and why you’re not going to be super responsive for a while (as an aside I really liked this point about treating people who matter to you as if they, you know, matter to you). An interesting detail Rich includes in this step is that you should close your eyes to really focus – at this point you’re not looking for any external input at all
Rich has a bunch of interesting stuff to say about what he calls your waking mind and your background mind (in the Leaning How to Learn course they call it focused and diffuse modes of attention, if you’ve taken that course this will all be pretty familiar). He uses his waking mind to assign tasks to his background mind and to analyze it’s products. Your background mind is where you solve most non-trivial problems but you can only feed it, not direct it. You need to spend enough time thinking about something for it to become an agenda item for your background mind to get anything useful from it.
Step 6 has two substeps, loading up your background mind and then letting it work. To load up your background mind you review everything you wrote down in the previous steps and really focus on it. Because your waking mind can only keep track of so many pieces of information at once (7 +- 2, as far as I know), you need to have written everything you know about your problem down so you can swap those pieces back into your working memory when you need them. To load all of this into your background mind you need to survey everything you’ve written down to give your background mind the chance to make connections between different things that your working mind didn’t realize could be connected. Rich stresses that you can’t do this at the computer, you need to go somewhere and have no external input. He recommends going somewhere you can close your eyes but not go to sleep so you can sort of switch your brain from external to internal input(all that information about your problem that you just reviewed).
The other substep is to leave the problem alone for a while and let your background mind do its thing. Sleep is a great way to do this, or going for a walk, or anything that gets your waking mind off of the problem. If you’re working on a hard problem you should sleep on it for at least one night, more if it’s a really hard problem. Just because you have an idea right away doesn’t mean you won’t have a better one in the morning. And once you have an idea, analyze it, don’t just run with it. Just because you slept on it doesn’t mean that solution that popped into your head in the morning is perfect.
Optional step 7: don’t stay stuck. If you have another problem to work on, do that when you feel stuck instead of just sitting there and staying stuck. If you don’t have another problem or really need to stay focused on your current one, gather more input, talk with more people if you can, and go through the whole process again.
A caveat to this whole process is that if you do have more than one problem you’re working on, you may spend hours loading up all the information about one problem and wake up the next morning with the answer to a different problem. That’s a thing you just have to accept, brains are funny sometimes. If you can’t switch to the other problem, at least write down the solution you came up with before going back into gathering information and loading it up for the problem you really want to solve.
Rich’s talk is really good and I highly recommend watching it yourself, but if you don’t have 40 minutes to dedicate to sitting in front of your computer then I hope this recap was helpful.