found drama

Sara Simon, Learning Fluency:

I’m writing this piece because building software is half strategy and half improvisation, and I really do think there are ways to train in both.

Given that my own background has a lot of overlap with her story, this struck a chord with me. The diverse interests, the broad learning, the liberal arts background. You can focus on computer science (or software engineering ¹) early and go as deep as possible, as fast as possible. But you’ll miss things.

But something else struck me here in Sara’s essay — something that should have been obvious to me because I have small children: that our important learning comes not in these big flashes (at least not most of the time), but in the repetition of small things. My kids do this. ² A tiny thing gets repeated over and over again ³ until it’s mastered, and then it’s just… there. ⁴

1. Or any field that strikes your fancy, really.[↩]
2. Just yesterday I watched for five minutes as my youngest fumbled with a button on his shirt. He eventually got it through the buttonhole. But man, there was some outrage at the offer of assistance.[↩]
3. ”What are you doing in there? Seriously? All day with that?” But put all that tedious stuff under the right lens and it sure sounds like they’re being productive.[↩]
4. And again: this should have been obvious to me from my recent study of Scrum and Agile, and its alignment to shu-ha-ri.[↩]

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