The Art of Better

What does “better” really mean? If we eliminate duplication, is the code better? If we decide to skip the unit tests, are we doing worse? How do we decide if one design is better than another design?

In this talk, I'll introduce the Idea Flow Learning Framework, a data-driven feedback loop for improving your software development skills. By measuring the “friction” that occurs when developers interact with the code, we can identify the biggest causes of friction and systematically optimize developer experience.

With an unambiguous definition of “better” and objective feedback to learn what works, we can learn our way to better despite the vast world of gray.

About 8 years ago, my project failed, despite “doing all the right things”, and shattered my faith in best practices. Since then, I've learned to measure developer experience as an objective measure of improvement, and I've been codifying the art of “better” into patterns and decision principles for years.

Why go to all this trouble? From my experience, the biggest causes of pain are seldom what we think. When we try to make things “better”, we can easily miss our biggest problems, or inadvertently make things worse. Visibility turned my beliefs about “better” upside-down.

In this talk, we'll cover the three stages of mastery at the core of the learning framework:

• Visibility - Learn to see the pain
• Clarity - Understand the causes of pain
• Awareness - Learn to avoid the pain

By making the pain visible and iteratively learning what works, we can master the art of software development.