programmer brain
Reviews
Why did I want to read this? I’m always about continuous learning, and this book looks interesting in the sense that there’s a more formal way to improve reading and writing code.
What did I get out of it? I did not really read the book. I read the notes from Yoann THIRION and his infographic, so I may miss some information, but I think I still got the gist of it. There’s lot about:
- Short Term Memory (STM): similar to RAM, where few items can fill in,
- Working Memory (WM): similar to CPU, where the actual “thinking” is happening,
- Long Term Memory (LTM): similar to hard drive, where we store memories for a long time, used to retrieve related knowledge (e.g. keywords).
We can use flashcards to retain things in our LTM. There are also lots of valuable advice (some are quite logical and we are already doing it, but having it written highlights them):
- clear names, no abbreviation
- What is surprising is that camelCase leads to high accuracy to snake_case… I personally find snake_case easier to read…
- create chunks of code, i.e. better organize, so we can understand the code easier
- …
One point I found interesting is the on-boarding process: instead of asking to implement a task, because the newcomer has high cognitive load since there are lots of information to digest, we should ask the newcomer to read and understand the code.