The Programmer’s Brain
What every programmer needs to know about cognition
Felienne Hermans
I was looking for the challenges faced by developers that concern cognitive load,
Stumbled upon this new book “Programmer’s Brain” by Felienne Hermans via Manning early access program, finished the first chapter
“Decoding your confusion while coding”
- I am already in love with it.
The first chapter gave me a sense of what programmers are dealing with. Describes the cognitive process involved in reading/writing a code. How the long-term memory, short-term memory & working memory come together to comprehend the problem.
As we all know the first step in dealing with the challenges is to nail down the problems.
Begin with the end in mind.
Three challenges that programmers face.
- Lack of knowledge ( Long term memory)
- It could be due to technology challenges,
- Because of the new dev stack,
- Complicated problem
- Lack of experience
2. Lack of information (Short term memory)
- Using 3rd party libs framework
- API docs not clear
- Requirements are not clear
- Transparency issues
3. Lack of processing power ( Working memory)
- This pandemic added a bit more to the problem, as most of the teams are remote, collaboration via chat has become mainline, which leads to frequent context switching
- Responding to chat, attending meetings.
- Multiple stuffs to deal with
- Not having clear goals
Rest of the chapters in the book explains how we can tackle those problems. Can’t wait to read the rest of chapters.
