Cucumber Spy

Sometimes the preface is sort of dashed off quickly, so ok. I took some deep cleansing breaths. I’m ready to leave my skepticism behind and fully move on to the actual book.

Good news, everyone! My plane is here & everyone got off it, but we won’t leave for another 2 hours. Hooray! So I can at least make it through the first chapter.

Page one, chapter one: programming requires “a creative mind and the ability to organize your thoughts.” The former: maybe sorta The latter: #nope

This is a classic mistake that I’ve seen often enough in talk proposals to give it a name: the “my amazing journey” talks.

My Amazing Journey!! In which a successful programmer analyzes how they think, so they can help others understand what it takes to succeed. But they lack the self-awareness to realize that their success was due more to circumstance than to their attributes or actions.

There are few talks more alienating to a diverse audience than My Amazing Journey!!. Always a hard pass.

The trouble with working in homogenous teams is that it reinforces your idea that everyone needs to think like you to succeed. After all, only your group succeeded!

This is a super common logical error that all humans are prone to, called “survivorship bias.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias … It’s also related to our brains’ insatiable desire to make a narrative out of...well, everything, but especially our own past.