Making Badass Developers - Kathy Sierra (Serious Pony) keynote 

Can you tell me more about your experience? It sounds very interesting.

Sure. If you have read any of the headfirst books, you'd know that it takes a rather unconventional approach to teaching and learning. I love programming, but for a long time I couldn't get past a lot of books that would just delve into pages full of code. I know I read and re-read the chapter on Objects at least 5 times and still didn't get the concept. Then Kathy and the headfirst series came along. I was actually having fun learning. She would use real life situations, or even go off 'dialogue style' and make up conversations (I really really loved those!). Being a writer of fiction when I am not programming, I came to learn java as I would read any novel, only with a deeper level of attention to the material. Soon, I finished headfirst java, and then I moved on to headfirst sql, finished that too... And with the basics firmly in my grasps, I started reading the dull dry books without problems. I am a big fan of Kathy, and I recommend her methods and strategies to anyone coming into programming newly or finding it hard to get past the initial struggle of becoming a programmer.

Yep, she showed that you get much better results when you engage your audience than when you try to impress them, even with deeply technical subjects. There is this idea among some people that because you have to deal with a lot of details that you would enjoy a book of minutia: this is what a lot of sw books were until Head First came around (lots of minutia).

hi jeremiah can you give us an example eg how did you learn java did you like make an app before knowing the basics or what cant understand thanks

Same! Also, when I ran into a bug in one of the programs in Head First Java, I emailed her & she had a look & saw that the new (then) version of Java that I was using introduced a bug, and she gave me the fixed code. What a lovely, nice person. I was devastated when she got bullied off the Net.

You should definitely start that!

+Dan Allison I'd love to :).... Where should we start?

+Javier Rovegno Campos Oh wow that's pretty close, I'm impressed...

Stack Overflow Documentation is something like this ...and it's in beta now.

doesn't that already exists? it's called npm.

Driving is a prime example that practices doesn't make perfect.

C

Yep. Still worth hearing the stories and studies though. Very interesting. She's an interesting speaker too

For me the message was a lot more about being aware of how you use your daily finite brain resource. I guess the next step is to find out how to use brain efficiently, which you describe above.

Probably not. Gist according to me is if someone wants to learn a skill say programming, then follow a two step approach: 1. Get high quality small examples 2. Get high quantity of such high quality small examples (200-300). Secondly, Divide a task to smaller task that can be done in 45-90 minutes, 3 sessions. Say, you want to get a document complete. Step 1: Session I (45 minutes) Outline Step 2: Session II (45 minutes) Content Step 3: Session III (45 minutes) Formatting If your document is not complete by 3 sessions, time to break down the sub tasks into smaller tasks Outline -Table of contents -Timeline description -Tables contents Content -.. -.. -.. etc. Then rerun the algorithm of 45-90 minutes, 3 sessions on subtasks Step 1: Session I (45 minutes) -Table of contents Step 2: Session II (45 minutes) -Timeline description Step 3: Session III (45 minutes) -Tables contents

Coding on TextEdit since 30 years? quite intelligent she is huh!

?? your superiority complex smells bad.

I usually apply Kanban rules over scrum methodologies, what do you gotta say about it?

+Calvin Coolidge The simplest concepts are largely based on patterns as well - and the brain does pattern matching really well. More complex concepts are based on simpler concepts, which are eventually boiled down to just patterns, which our brains handle for us (given the chance). To use your example of loops, over the course of an hour, I'd probably teach the while loop first, and then have the learners spend a few minutes doing some really simple loops before then introducing nested loops. After about 10 minutes on the while loop, they'd then start the for loop. Same again, and after around 10 minutes of that, I'd move on to mixing the two loops for a further 10 minutes. At the half hour mark, I'd move onto do while loops, do those for 10 minutes, and then spend the final 20 minutes doing examples of all three kinds of loops. After they were done with each exercise, they'd be shown the model answer and be moved onto the next exercise. By the end of that hour, they'd probably be sick of loops, but they'd be able to do them in their sleep.

+Calvin Coolidge Let's make one...

Sometimes you just write the code which actually works and you do it without knowing or implementing the algorithm. It's the brain that matches the pattern. When you have a clear vision about your goal, your brain works hard to to find numerous ways to reach your destination.

I had a similar thought; I'm not that knowledgeable in machine learning, but the part when she talked about learning by getting exposure to a lot of examples and figuring out the patterns, sounded like the concept of training a supervised learning model (neural networks, specifically, came to my mind) :).

+A Matías Quezada watched it on x2 ..

+A Matías Quezada Use Transcript.

you just need more exposure to it)

She speaks fast....? WHAT

She ate cake and stayed in a cage before getting on stage.

front end developer that is. We need to start learning Golang, Node JS, PHP7, something high class and cool

Can I please borrow your line to put this as my status on my social profile of the coders group of my company ??I feel the same but you have put it in very apt manner which is impressive

Unicorns do not exist. So you cannot find them. Some are looking for someone with the perfect skill set, however such person is mythical and does not actually exist. Hence the term "looking for unicorns". Think about looking for a secretary who speaks Estonian, Greek, Cantonese and Swahili. What are your odds of finding such a person? Such a person would be called a "unicorn".

Thanks for the explanation, I got it. Based on the answer I'm sure you are a human, thanks again Malik. :)

unicorns are curly braces in programming lol

experience is even better.