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Another anecdote: The point in my life where I felt like I thought the most clearly and quickly about programming was when I used pen/pencil and paper. I learn

Another anecdote: The point in my life where I felt like I thought the most clearly and quickly about programming was when I used pen/pencil and paper. I learned a lot of my development skills on paper, not on computers. Lots of exams, programs, etc. All written out by hand. Now what's nice about paper as a medium is you're not restricted to just text you can mix in drawings and pretty much anything else to attack your thinking from different angles. You could do this on a computer, but it's just so much slower to draw out diagrams and doesn't have the same feeling.

bigtunacan 6y ago
I like to think I'm a decent programmer and I'm also a down right terrible hobbyist illustrator/cartoonist. Over the years I've filled notebook after notebook with a mix of hand written notes and bad illustrations to help solidify the ideas in my own mind. Occasionally I will page back through looking for something I remember I wrote down, but most of it is just to help myself in the moment. As an extension of this, when someone comes and asks me a question I start with a verbal explanation. If it isn't clicking for the person I quickly reach for a pen or a whiteboard marker and start drawing diagrams while I talk. This usually leads to a quicker "aha" moment for the person; a picture is worth a thousand words. For a long time it was not something I considered much; it's just been an extension of how I think for as long as I can remember. Sometime back I ran into an ex-colleague; we hadn't worked together in about a decade. After the usual chit chat of catching up she said to me, "Do you still doodle when you work? I will always remember how you constantly drew pictures of everything and how it made things so much easier to understand. I hope you still do that.". I laughed and told her how surprised I was that someone would even remember that after so many years, but that yes I continued to draw pictures of my thoughts like I always had.

bigtunacan 6y ago

I like to think I'm a decent programmer and I'm also a down right terrible hobbyist illustrator/cartoonist. Over the years I've filled notebook after notebook with a mix of hand written notes and bad illustrations to help solidify the ideas in my own mind. Occasionally I will page back through looking for something I remember I wrote down, but most of it is just to help myself in the moment. As an extension of this, when someone comes and asks me a question I start with a verbal explanation. If it isn't clicking for the person I quickly reach for a pen or a whiteboard marker and start drawing diagrams while I talk. This usually leads to a quicker "aha" moment for the person; a picture is worth a thousand words. For a long time it was not something I considered much; it's just been an extension of how I think for as long as I can remember. Sometime back I ran into an ex-colleague; we hadn't worked together in about a decade. After the usual chit chat of catching up she said to me, "Do you still doodle when you work? I will always remember how you constantly drew pictures of everything and how it made things so much easier to understand. I hope you still do that.". I laughed and told her how surprised I was that someone would even remember that after so many years, but that yes I continued to draw pictures of my thoughts like I always had.