10am: How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process, by Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke.

I heard Robin speak in the microtalks last year; she’s at thatgamecompany now. Good talk, and surprisingly moving: they started off by talking about how, at E3 2008, they debuted Flower, the press and their publisher loved it, yet the team’s morale was at an all-time low! Their development process was putting all sorts of stresses on them, which they needed to fix lest the company implode soon. (Which, I should emphasize, isn’t anything particularly negative about their company, just typical game development culture.)

Some of the key points for how to build a sustainable development process, so they can keep making the games they love indefinitely instead of burning out after a few years:

• They needed to distinguish between commitments and estimates.

Both are important; but, if you don’t hit an estimate, that may be a learning experience (or may not, variability is natural, especially in creative work), but certainly isn’t anything to beat yourself up over (or for others to beat you up over), whether consciously or subconsciously.

Also, in an exploratory phase in your process, who knows how long it will take to find the game’s real core mechanic. (Shades of Iwata’s keynote last year.) So estimates there have a particularly large margin of error. Be confident that you still have a vision for the game inside of you; it will come out eventually.

• Planning and feedback is important.

They have a big board sketching out milestones over the entire lifetime of the project; on a smaller level, they have two-week sprints, with standups three days a week. Their sprint goals aren’t as rigid as some teams do them, but it’s important to have the task cards up there, as a point for discussion.

Which leads to what I saw as their main takeaway:

• Have conversations; don’t shy away for them, especially if they’re difficult.

The point of having task cards is so that you can see and talk about them if they’re not moving as you expect: are they harder than expected, are they unpleasant, are they simply something that nobody cares about? Or, if your explorations suggest that expected mechanics won’t work or that you’ll need more exploration than expected, don’t hide, even though you’re really nervous: talk to your publishers, talk to your marketers. And don’t just give the bad news: talk about your vision, talk about why you think this will make the game better. More broadly: remember that conversations aren’t part of a zero-sum game: they’re all on the same team!

One other amusing bit from the talk: we call a task easy in one of three cases: 1) we really want it to happen; 2) we have no idea what it entails; or 3) we don’t have to do it ourselves!

And, finally, the summary:

• Be honest.
• Wandering is okay.
• On every project.
• Until you die.

11:15 am: Kids and Parents Playing Together Online: the Next Frontier of Casual Gaming, by Jesse Schell.

Lots of good points here, starting from the basic point that you have to decide to design for this, not just (for example) build a kids’ game and hope that the parents will like it. Looking through my notes, I don’t see any huge insights that I’ll be able to provide beyond what you’d get from his slides, so I’ll just embed them here.

11:45 am: Lessons Learned building Moshi Monsters to 15m Users, by Michael Acton Smith.

Moshi Monsters was done by a company that had just burned through most of their venture funding, on a real-world cross-media game PerplexCity that sounded fascinating but wasn’t profitable. So they didn’t have much margin of error. Failure was still okay, but they needed to fail fast: which they started off doing, by trying a Webkinz model of physical goods linking to an online world. They stopped doing that, and immediately got a lot more signups, which they eventually managed to monetize quite successfully.

They monetized using a subscription model; he said that a good subscription model is sliced (so free players get to see parts of it), and visual (so free players can see what subscribing players have). The price points matter: they had 1 month, 6 months, and 12 month plans, and initially set them up so the longer plans were a modest savings over shorter ones. That led to most people signing up for 1 months; so they switched to putting a much narrower gap between the 6 and 12 month plans (5 / 24 / 30 pounds, respectively), and all of a sudden almost everybody signed up for 12 months! Another anecdote along those lines: when the Economist had an online-only subscription for $59 and a print and online for $125, then 68% of people chose the online-only version; but when they added a print-only option to their price list, also priced at $125, then it switched to 84% of people choosing the print and online option!

1:45 pm: The Convergence of Flash Games and Social Games, by Daniel Cook.

I went to this talk because I love Lost Garden and because slides from talks he’s posted there before looked good. But it was mostly focused on how to use ideas from social games to be successful on Flash portals; not so interesting for somebody who has been reading Dan’s ideas on his blog for years, who is already in the social game space, and who doesn’t want to be successful on Flash portals.

3:00 pm: Seriously, Make YOUR Game!, by Paolo Pedercini and Jason Rohrer.

Paolo’s bit was amusing theater. Jason’s went into the details more: it turns out that his upcoming African diamonds DS game didn’t have its origin as a social statement, but rather from thinking of what multiplayer strategy video games can do that board games can’t, deciding that hidden knowledge (e.g. spying on the other player’s position) is one possibility, and coming up with a game mechanic where hidden knowledge about knowledge would work. (Having agents in the field buying diamonds, who can possibly be bribed.)

Also, when playtesting the basic purchasing mechanics with a physical game, he found that they weren’t much fun; going into it a bit more, he discovered that they’d stumbled on Nash equilibrium behavior. He broke that in two ways: by introducing a nontransitive relationship (basically, a hidden rock-paper-scissors mechanic, to avoid a dominant strategy) and by having bids where both the winner and loser pay (to avoid having the bid price settle at the item’s value).

4:15 pm: Indie Gamemaker Rant!.

No super standouts, though certainly better than yesterday’s AI rant. I guess the part that clicked the most with me was Robin Hunicke talking about the many ways in which having a male-dominated industry is a problem. Certainly her and Kellee’s talk earlier this morning struck me as a good example of how bringing a broader set of perspectives is likely to have a positive effect on your game’s development.

So that was today’s talks; my first time going to the Summits part of the conference, it’s mellower than the main conference. Very nice dinner, too, and I was glad to finally get to meet Jorge Albor!

Lots of fun; one fallout that I particularly remember was having my desk moved by a high school science teacher (who also happened to be my mother) because a friend of mine and I kept on talking about cryptic crossword solutions. I let my subscription lapse when I went away to college, though, since I had more than enough else to keep me busy.

I would still look for copies when I was traveling, however, because it’s a perfect accompaniment for a plane trip. And new puzzle varieties appeared in its pages over the years; Liesl and I both went through a big Paint by Numbers phase, for example. But one trio of new puzzles caught my eye in particular: Nurikabe, Masyu, and Slitherlink. Unlike crossword puzzles, they’re pure logic puzzles, not depending on any sort of outside knowledge; unlike Sudoku, your solution largely develops locally, so if you discover you’ve made a mistake, you can usually fix it without having to start over from scratch. They all develop in a wonderfully organic fashion, with tendrils starting in various places on the puzzle, and slowly extending until they’ve all met and completed the puzzle.

Eventually, I noticed that Games magazine got all of those three puzzle types from the same source, namely Nikoli. Which is a Japanese company, so I couldn’t find their books in American stores; I poked around, though, and found a few other sources of Nurikabe puzzles. Which proved to be a disappointment: the solutions just didn’t unfold in the same organic way as the solutions to Nikoli-authored puzzles did. So it’s not just the rules of the puzzle that matters: even though it’s a puzzle of pure logic, the author makes a real difference.

At some point, I had enough different Japanese products that I wanted that I couldn’t find in the U.S. that I figured I’d order from Amazon Japan; and I threw a few Nikoli books into the mix. And I’m very glad I did: if you order enough stuff to spread out the worst of the shipping costs, they’re actually quite cheap, contain dozens of hours of entertainment, and even fit into a jeans pocket in a pinch. (Which is convenient if you’re on a trip, if you naturally go through museums slightly faster than your travel companions, and if you have to check your backpack.) I had great fun going through the nurikabe and masyu books that I ordered, didn’t like another one (Numberlink) so much, and was enjoying slitherlink.

But even though I was enjoying Slitherlink, I wasn’t at ease with it in the same way as I was with Nurikabe and Masyu. My solutions to the latter ones unfolded smoothly (honestly, to the extent that they’re a bit easy, though never unpleasant), whereas with Slitherlink, I was constantly getting stuck and having to search all over for my next move. It got bad enough that, when trying and failing to do the last puzzle in the second (of four) sizes in the book, I was ready to give up: the puzzle was taking me ages, I was reading possibilities ahead hoping in vain for contradictions, and I just wasn’t enjoying myself any more; and the larger sizes ahead of me would just exacerbate those problems.

Out of stubborn pride, though, I decided to take one last swing at finishing that puzzle. I gave up all sense of shame, and marked down on the puzzle every little thing I knew: if a square was marked as a zero, I would dutifully put little x’s on all four sides, even though it was obvious that lines couldn’t go on those sides. And, in doing so, two surprising things happened: for one thing, I noticed several places where I hadn’t noticed that I could apply simple rules (instead of searching in depth). And, for another thing, I discovered several new consequences of the rules! As the text version of the rules says,

Its greatest feature is countless theorems. Experience the feeling of getting much skilled when you find new theorem.

Which I’d mostly decided by that point was puffery: yes, I’d found three or four theorems, but it had been ages since I’d found any more, surely I’d found all there were? Apparently not, and, as became clear as I proceeded further through the book, I wasn’t even particularly close to discovering all the useful theorems.

And wow, what a puzzle form Slitherlink turns out to be, to the extent that it’s now my favorite logic puzzle format. Which is due to two reasons, namely:

• It balances local and global requirements.

The main lesson I’ve learned from the Nikoli games is that I like puzzles where I spend most of my time figuring out what’s going on locally, but where the puzzle has just enough of a global constraint to give an overall structure.

Slitherlink is a fine example of that: the rule that each numbered square tells you how many sides are filled in is purely local, and while the rule that the solution forms a single loop looks global (and is, of course), it has a few immediate local corollaries, namely that you can’t have dead-ends, branches, or tiny loops. Because of this, I can spend time developing a front, I can move from one front to another if I get stuck, I can (usually) only erase a portion of the puzzle if I find I’ve made a mistake, and I can occasionally get surprised by looking at the whole puzzle and realizing that my next move is forced by a large loop that is almost closed.

• The balance between following mindless rules, higher-level rules, and exhaustive search.

This one is a little more subtle. Any puzzle has rules, which frequently directly force your move. And any good puzzle is going to have situations where you just have to read out the consequences of options, hoping to find a contradiction before you get too far.

But if you do too much of the former, you get bored; if you do too much of the latter, you get frustrated. And what Slitherlink shows is that there’s a third choice: there are constraints that are true but not immediately obvious from the game’s rules. As you discover this, your rule-following behavior becomes richer (because there are more patterns to recognize), and your exhaustive search also becomes richer (because you can search more deeply, with the help of these extra rules to prune your search). And, in a further reward loop, you can occasionally systematize the result of an exhaustive search in the form of a newly-discovered higher-level rule.

Most of the puzzles in the second half of the book took me more than an hour to solve, and I’m sure several took me more than two hours to solve; normally, that would be a sign that I’m banging my head against the wall in frustration, but not this time. I’m sure that, as I work through further Slitherlink books, the puzzles will become more routine, and I’ll be looking for something new, but for now it’s great fun.

(Incidentally, my main takeaway from the iPad launch: I really hope that Nikoli produces games for that device. They have some Akari puzzles for the iPhone, which I highly recommend, but the iPhone is too small for their richest puzzles; the iPad could be a perfect device for those puzzles, though.)

Or at least I was until I heard the first question: “do you think the country is basically going in the right direction or do you think things are going pretty seriously off track?” Yeah, survey purposes, right.

Time to go e-mail my various representatives, I think, just to provide a bit of a nudge in the direction I want?

Update: I have been convinced by some of my commentors that, at the very least, the title of this post is inappropriate.

But the chinks in my system have been showing. As we know from queueing theory, if you keep your queues too close to their average capacity, then, when something goes wrong, things go out of control pretty fast. And, a couple of weeks ago, I had a cold that dragged on for a while; that, combined with some evening events that I had to drive to, meant that I didn’t walk to work for two weeks straight. The result was that I now have way too many podcasts to listen to.

Which has caused me to re-evaluate my behavior. One question that it raises: why do I feel that I have to listen to those podcasts? Just what does it mean to me to be subscribed to a podcast? My meaning had been that I intended to listen to every episode of that podcast; as I’m discovering, that’s a significant commitment, enough so that I should make it consciously instead of through inertia.

And, now that I think about it, I’m realizing that that compulsion conflicts with one of my planning rules. I try to structure my life so that, as much as possible, I’m doing what I’m most interested in at any given moment; the mere existence of subscriptions encourage me to not even think about that question. And, to the extent that I do think about the question, it biases my results: for example, it makes it less likely for me to listen to CDs, because I have to fit them in between my podcast subscriptions.

Don’t get my wrong, I really like the podcasts that I’m subscribed to. Having said that, if I didn’t have time to listen to, say, In Our Time last week, is there any reason for me to make a point of finding time to listen to last week’s episode? Stated that way, my behavior is a bit silly: there are no end of episodes that were made before I started to subscribe to the podcast; I haven’t listened to them, so what makes the more recent episodes so special?

And that’s not an isolated example. Looking through what I have in iTunes, most of the podcasts that I’m subscribed to are ones that I don’t really have a reason to commit to listening to every episode. So, while I’m not unsubscribing from any of them, I’m also going to pause on listening to several of them while I catch up on other listening, and I’m unchecking the box that will cause them to be synced to my iPhone until I’m more confident that I want to spend time listening to them.

Having said that, I’m not completely giving up on my old conception of subscriptions. In particular, I really do like JapanesePod101, This American Life, and Planet Money enough to want to listen to every episode. (There are other podcasts that I also plan to listen to every episode of, but those three are the only ones that regularly come out at least once a week.) That’s about three hours a week of listening; that will leave me with quite a bit of unscheduled listening time where I’ll be able to explore more widely than I have been in the past.

My blog reading has gotten out of control a little more subtly: it’s not that I don’t have enough time to read the blogs in my feed reader, it’s more that doing so eats up enough of my time that I find it hard to get a solid hour to really concentrate. So, if I catch up on my reading on some evening, then doing so rarely leaves me able to, say, write a blog post of my own or play a game or read a book. (The latter of which I’m not doing nearly enough these days!) So, while I am spending too much time reading blogs, it’s also interfering with my time usage out of promotion to the total time I’m spending on it. Also, constantly feeling like I’m under pressure to clear out my reader means that I don’t always take the time to really think about longer form posts, posts that are saying something new to me. (Which is more than a bit ironic, given the average length of my own posts; I’m very grateful to those of you who actually read these!)

This is pretty screwed up: I need time to think and do, to not always be hitting the ‘j’ button. Fortunately, phrasing my behavior that way makes the next step pretty clear: I should cut out larger chunks of free time explicitly by timeboxing my blog reading. Concretely, I’m going to experiment with only reading blogs three days a week: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and once on the weekend. And I’ll try to clear out my feed reader every time: if I don’t make it through my feeds, that’s a sign that either I have to unsubscribe from feeds to fit my time budget or I have to get used to the “mark all as read” button.

It’s an experiment. But I need to make more time for myself; I also need to make more time that I can spend with primary experiences (games, music, books), instead of secondary reflections. I’m overcommitted right now: I need to rediscover the void in my life, or at least a richer texture.

According to the work of Bergson and Minkowski, two profoundly interrelated aspects seem to coexist with reference to time:

• Becoming. An abstract, dimensional aspect of time, which gives rise to the habit of measuring time (seconds, minutes, hours); the idea of representing time on an axis, as we would spatial dimensions; the concept of the duration of an event (the distance between two points on the temporal axis); the idea of being late (once again the distance between two points on the temporal axis).
• The succession of events. A concrete aspect of temporal order: we wake up, we take a shower, we have breakfast, we study, we have lunch, we have a nap, we play, we eat, and we go to bed. Children come to have this notion of time before they develop the idea of abstract time which passes regardless of the events that take place.

Of these two aspects, it is becoming that generates anxiety – it is, by nature, elusive, indefinite, infinite: time passes, slips away, moves toward the future. If we try to measure ourselves against the passage of time, we feel inadequate, oppressed, enslaved, defeated, more and more with every second that goes by. We lose our élan vital, our vital contact, which enables us to accomplish things. “Two hours have gone by and I’m still not done; two days have gone by and I’m still not done.” In a moment of weakness, the purpose of the activity at hand is often no longer even clear. The succession of events, instead, seems to be the less anxiety-ridden aspect of time. At times it may even represent the regular succession of activity, a calm-inducing rhythm.

I’d heard a bit about the technique before, enough to know that it tells you to break your work up into 25 minute chunks and to try to really focus during those chunks, avoiding distractions and interruptions. It turns out that there’s more to the technique than that, however: it gives guidelines about breaks between chunks (3-5 minute breaks normally, longer breaks after every four chunks), there’s a whole planning and estimating mechanic you’re supposed to use with it (starting each day estimating your tasks in terms of pomodori, and reviewing your day at the end), and there are also mechanisms for tracking and actively tabling your interruptions.

What really sold me about the talk, though, was that, 25 minutes into it, a timer went off, and we all took a break for a few minutes! We took another break 25 minutes later; I think that it’s a great idea to break a 90-minute presentation into three chunks like that. As it happened, I’d been feeling over the course of the conference that I hadn’t been getting enough done over the evenings; so, that evening, I decided to give the pomodoro technique a try, and really focus on things for 25 minutes at a time.

Which turned out to work remarkably well: I probably got as much done that evening of the conference as in the other four evenings put together. Despite which I didn’t use the technique over the next month or so: I was pairing on a project in my last weeks at Sun, we were doing quite a good job concentrating as it was, and it didn’t seem to be a good time to introduce something new.

When I started work at Playdom, though, I picked up the technique again, and I’m glad I did. When I describe the technique to other people, one frequent concern that comes up is: doesn’t the timer going off interrupt your flow? For me, though, my problem is almost always too little flow rather than too much; and the pomodoro technique works great with that. I can stop myself from wandering for 25 minutes if I try, and I know I have a little release valve coming up in the not-too-distant future if I need one. And it occasionally happens that I’m banging my head against something unproductively and need the cooling off period between pomodoros to get myself thinking that I really should take a different approach. Also, it can be a big help if the next task seems frightening in some way: you’re not faced with wandering through something unknown and probably unpleasant for an unbounded amount of time, you’re faced with spending 25 minutes trying to shed a bit more light on your current situation, which is a much more palatable prospect. And I think the explicit guidelines for both shorter and longer breaks are helpful for me.

I’ve tried other aspects of the technique as well; they have had benefits, but I’m less sold on them. The planning period is a helpful reminder that I should think about all the different things that I’m considering working on (my next actions for my various projects, in GTD speak), and pomodoros give me permission to carve out a bounded amount of time to work on tasks that are important but not urgent. Having said that, I haven’t found much of a benefit from the actual process of estimating how many pomodoros a task will take at the start of the day: it doesn’t seem to be solving any problems that I have, and I have other mechanisms for telling myself when I’m getting stuck. (E.g. if I’m not doing multiple git commits over the course of a pomodoro, that might be a sign that things are going well.) So I’m stopping that for the time being.

And there’s one aspect of the pomodoro technique that I’m actively dubious about. One of the core rules is that the pomodoro is indivisible: if you don’t spend the whole 25 minutes working on what you planned, then it doesn’t count as a pomodoro, and you’re strongly encouraged to have as many pomodoros count as possible. There’s a bit of wiggle room here—if your plan at the start of the day has tasks that you think will take less than one pomodoro, then you can combine multiple of them in your plan to make a single pomodoro, and if you finish a task within the first five minutes of a pomodoro, then you’re encouraged to cancel the pomodoro, with the feeling that it was “really” finished in the last pomodoro. If you go beyond the first five minutes, though, you’re supposed to stick it out until the timer rings: in particular, the technique recommends that you spend spare time overlearning, delving into the area in question more deeply than you would otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, overlearning is a great idea: it’s a similar philosophy to always doing a bit of refactoring once you’ve got your code working. Except that the pomodoro philosophy is different: you don’t always do it, you only do it if there’s time left on your pomodoro, and the amount of overlearning you should do is proportional to the time left. And that just seems bizarre to me.

Take this blog post, for example: I have a pomodoro timer running as I type this. If the timer goes off when I’ve got it done but not properly edited, I don’t want the pomodoro technique encouraging me to hit publish so that I won’t have a big gap to fill in my next pomodoro. After I’ve hit the publish button, probably a bit of overlearning wouldn’t be a bad idea—e.g. this blog post is suggesting an idea for another blog post I could write, so maybe I’ll take some notes on that. But that sounds like a good idea no matter how much time is left on the pomodoro; and those notes will probably take about 5 minutes, so what am I supposed to do if I turn out to have 15 minutes left on my timer when I hit the publish button?

So that doesn’t make much sense to me. The result is that I’m not feeling any guilt about either canceling a pomodoro if I finish a task in the middle of one or about not canceling the pomodoro and launching into a second task without a break in the same pomodoro. (Hmm, I probably should have a preference for one or the other of those solutions, maybe the former?)

But the core idea seems sound, and many of the surrounding ideas have seeds of something that I quite like (e.g. the concept of overlearning), even if I’m not convinced by their details.

Some resources I’ve found useful:

• The main pomodoro technique site. In particular, it contains a 45-page PDF book giving more details into the technique.
• Pomodoro Technique Illustrated. I haven’t read the final version, but the author had a beta version on his web site for a while, and I quite liked it.
• The pomodoro timer I’m using on my Mac.

• Joe Armstrong and Simon Peyton Jones discussing Erlang and Haskell. (Via @timbray.)
• SuperBetter, Jane McGonigal’s serious-injury-recovery game. (Via @therealfitz.)

• Elite Beat Agents, meet Phoenix Wright!

  (Via GameSetWatch.

• A light-and-mirror puzzle in a tabletop RPG.
• Cloud pictures. (Via Dubious Quality; the fungus-infected violin link is pretty good, too.)

• A music video version of Danc’s Flash Love Letters.

• Mitu Khandaker on immersion and controllers.

• The best Zork walkthrough I’ve ever heard.

  (Via MTV Multiplayer.)

• And, because I seem to be incapable of doing one of these without some sort of random Japanese offering:

  (Via Pink Tentacle, of course.)

The first was given by Jon Dahl, on “Aristotle and the Art of Software Development”. You can see video and slides of an earlier delivery of the talk. (I don’t think it changed much between deliveries; I also don’t know how much sense the slides will make out of context.) He viewed this subject through a lens of ethics: a Kantian view focusing on actions (and, in particular, universal principles motivating them); a Millsian view focusing on outcomes; and an Aristotelian view focusing on actors.

As you might suspect from the title of the talk, Dahl was most taken with the third point of view. (Which begins about 15 minutes into the video or 70 slides into the deck.) He presented Aristotle as linking ethics with happiness and a life well lived, and with virtue (in the sense of performing your function well). Honestly, it may be the case that many of these words had significantly different meanings for Aristotle than they would for us; in particular, Dahl glossed the Greek term that he translates as “happiness” as coming from “good” plus “spirit”; depending on how one takes the compound, I could imagine that as meaning “one whose spirit is good”, which makes the idea that ethical people are happy potentially more of a tautology than an an interesting statement.

Leaving these glosses aside: the point is that being good (virtuous) at something is inherent in the people who are good, rather than being rule-based. Which raises the question: how do you become a virtuous person? In the talk at Agile 2009, it sounded like at least some of Aristotle’s answer to that is fatalist: virtuous people are born, not made. (And—stop me if you’ve heard this before—virtuous people always turn out to be rich non-barbarian males. Sigh.) Watching the video of the RubyConf version, though, there’s a less fatalistic point of view: you gain virtue through practice and through modeling. So, to become an expert, you should hang out with experts, and practice; as you gain expertise, use your improved understanding to improve both your expert detection and your practice.

In contrast, if you’re a Kantian, instead of looking for good people, you look out for good principles, and follow them rigorously. In an Aristotelian point of view (again, with the caveat that it’s been decades since I’ve read any Aristotle myself, I’m just going by the talk), it would be possible to have virtues without formalizing the principles at all; furthermore, Aristotle’s virtues are means between excesses and defects (see slide 95; this gives me a Buddhist vibe, too), so following rules too strictly may actually be a sign that you’re straying from virtue.

The other talk was one by Mary Poppendieck on “Deliberate Practice in Software Development”. It discussed the nature versus nurture question of becoming an expert. My memory of the talk is that she strongly came down on the nurture side of that; rereading the slides, I’m not sure my memory is correct, but what is correct is that she claimed that nature alone is not enough: the way you get to Carnegie Hall is, indeed, to practice. Specifically: people need to practice their field for about 10,000 hours before becoming experts; and those who do eventually become experts practice longer and harder than those who don’t.

This last sentence, of course, doesn’t settle the nature or nurture debate: it may be that those who aren’t naturally gifted won’t become expert violinists no matter how long they practice. On a more meta level, it may also be the case that, without the appropriate nature, you’ll find practicing violin for 10,000 hours so offputting that you’ll give it up long before then. So it’s not clear (at least to me) to what extent nature is necessary; it does seem to be the case, however, that nurture (in the form of practicing) is necessary to become an expert, and in fact quite a bit of nurture is.

It’s not the case, however, that any old 10,000 hours of practice will do. As the title of the talk says, it should be “deliberate practice”, and Poppendieck listed four key factors in making the practice successful: a mentor, a challenge, feedback, and dedication. You want somebody else to guide you; you don’t want to be complacent; you want to know how your work is turning out; and, even with that, you need to put in the sweat. And she gave examples of how you might structure your work to support this. (Looking at it through a lean viewpoint; the slides don’t mention them, though the talk may well have, but I’ll bring up A3 reports.)

I was planning to turn this post into some sort of grand overarching pulling together of the above with some other articles that had come across my twitter feed. But, after listening to Dahl’s talk again, I’m having a hard time finding any nice symmetries. So, I’ll conclude with talking off the top of my head (as if I ever do anything else!):

Poppendieck’s recommendations don’t contradict the Aristotelian point of view: in particular, it sounds like Aristotle would wholeheartedly support having a mentor. Can we make other links: maybe Mill’s utilitarian point of view resonates with feedback, for example? Actually, I’m surprised at how hard it is to find explicit Kantian resonances with the deliberate practice model; is that a sign of something deep, or is that just a sign that the idea of having principles to guide us is to obvious as to not need stating? (As a side note, right now I’m finding the idea of following quite detailed Kantian principles in software development to be strangely appealing.)

The nature versus practice question is one that I’m interested in for both personal reasons and parental reasons. Take the question of how nature affects our practice habits: I’m a decent musician, but I was never one who was drawn to spend hour after hour after hour in practice rooms honing my art. I’m sure I could have become a better musician than I actually am, though I don’t know where my ceiling would be (if that concept even makes sense), but I do know that doing so would have required quite a bit more desire out of me. And I certainly support Poppendieck’s claim that not all practice is created equal: I’ve seen more than enough of people doing “practice” in ways that strike me as noticeably suboptimal.

As for nature and raw talent: I’ve seen enough exceptional people that I don’t believe that nature is irrelevant to becoming a world-class expert, from an outside point of view. But, from an internal point of view, it’s probably best to pretend that it is irrelevant: Poppendieck’s deliberate practice recommendations sound pretty solid to me, and I’m fairly sure that anybody following them and putting in the time would improve anybody’s skills. They also suggest a meta-approach: improve your skills at deliberate practice. Though, of course, you can’t just do that in isolation: you want to deliberately practice deliberate practice, which (among other things) means actually learning stuff.

Looking at holes in my own practice: of Poppendieck’s four recommendations, the area where I probably do worst is in finding mentors. (Indeed, in retrospect I probably should have spent rather more time acting as a mentor while managing the last few years. Sorry!) I imagine I shy away from feedback (both giving and receiving), too.

Important stuff; I hope we can all figure this out.

Buying an iPod Touch changed that, though. Once I took a bit of care to add a stylesheet that looked good on the device, I found that it was just as easy to go through my vocabulary on the iPod as it was on the computer, and it was hugely easier to fit the review into spare moments of the day. So I switched from doing one big review a day to at least three a day, plus a few more when I had spare moments around the house.

So that was a huge help. I still couldn’t review vocabulary during spare moments at work, though; and once I got an iPhone, the number of places where I could conceivably review vocabulary but couldn’t actually do so got even larger! This made making the program available safely on the internet a lot more urgent.

I ended up using authlogic for authentication support; there were a few odd testing issues, but in general it worked quite well. (I think I’ve figured out at least one of the testing issues; I hope to have time soon to confirm my hypothesis and submit a patch.) And once that was in place, adding the general plumbing to link items with users was straightforward. (And I learned something about Rails in the bargain.)

I still don’t necessarily recommend that anybody else use it. For one thing, I suspect that the spacing of my review sessions isn’t optimal: I’m using exponential spacing more out of optimism than any strong evidence that it’s the best pattern to use, and in fact I get the feeling that some of my gaps in the months-out range are a little bit off. And, for another thing, I’m sure that there are features that I don’t need that others would find important; I can’t promise to be able to add them.

I will, however, strongly recommend that, if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and are considering using some sort of timed review program, that you don’t choose a desktop-only solution (unless you have a desktop computer in your bathroom): it makes a huge difference to be able to nibble away at your items when you have free time instead of having to do larger batches at less frequent intervals. And I hope that I’ll be able to add feature requests that I deem sensible without making you wait too much; alternatively, I’m happy to make a Mercurial repository available if you want to tinker with it yourself. I will also back up your data offsite nightly (though I make no uptime guarantees for the server my program is hosted on: it’s my home computer, and if something bad happens while I’m on vacation, it could take a couple of weeks to get it fixed). And you should be able to export your items / timing information as an XML file at will, if you want to change solutions. (Though it’s your problem getting that XML file translated into whatever format the other solution wants!) Having used it for more than a year gives me confidence that I’ll remain interested enough that it shouldn’t disappear for the forseeable future.

So if any of you wants to give it a try, let me know and I’ll set you up with an account.

Incidentally, I mentioned a few months ago that I was feeling a bit swamped with projects and conference prep, and was planning to step back some from my normal blogging schedule. (Especially the video game related parts of it.) Fortunately, Agile 2009 is now over (though, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both the preparation and conference very much!), and some of my side projects are winding down, so things should be getting back to normal around here. In fact, over the last week and a half things have been much more prolific than normal on this blog; I don’t plan to keep that up, but it is very nice both to have the time and energy to blog like that and to remind myself that I really enjoy doing so.