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Tag: Internalization

Internalizing knowledge is very useful

The human mind is incredible. It can accomplished great things though conscious thought, but what it can learn to internalize and do automatically is remarkable. As a result learning to internalize software development principals and concepts can allow developers to accomplish much more.

General Examples

Starting from a young age in school we are taught the alphabet, then words, sentances, paragraphs, essays and beyond. There are many details and rules that we are taught over years. Over time these get internalized by the brain and become automatic processes. Years after leaving school when we write something we don’t think about nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammar trees, etc. All of that knowledge has become mostly automatic, so we just sit down and write. By not having to consciously focus on those details it frees up our minds to think about higher level concepts like our goals for the writing, composition, etc.

Later on most people learn to drive. Driving involves following a bunch of rules, doing multiple things simultaneously and being aware of the situation and surroundings moment to moment. Not making mistakes is important because accidents are dangerous. When first starting out driving is really hard and kinda scary. It can feel overwhelming to do all of the things required constantly. But jump ahead after 10+ years of continuous daily driving and its so easy we don’t even pay conscious attention. The mind can internalize everything required for driving so thoroughly that one can drive between home and work and, upon arrival, not even be able to remember anything about the drive. Its like being on auto-pilot.

The human mind is able to internalize all sorts of things if the individual does them frequently for a long period of time. Years after something has been internalized it becomes difficult to consciously recall the rules and facts required by the task that has become automatic. This is beneficial because when things become automatically handled by our subconscious it frees up our conscious to think on a higher level about the task or (such as for driving) to do other unrelated things.

Software Development & Myself

Applying this to myself, I’ve spent so much time doing software development for so long that I’ve internalized a great deal.

I started programming when I was 7 or 8. By 11 I was pretty good; By 14 I was doing really complex, detailed programming. I really enjoyed development so I spent a ton of time learning as much as I could and constantly improving myself. I had no clue, but by the time I graduated high school I was significantly better at software development than most college graduates. From there I went on to tackle bigger, more complex and more unusual projects.

During my early years there were incredibly few books available, and none in normal book stores. If you could find them they had to be mail ordered. Thus I figured out most of the fundamental concepts, patterns, etc. myself before I ever read or heard about them. The “SOLID” principals had not been defined, but I figured them out for myself (except dependency inversion which wasn’t really practical at the time). I learned the concepts of object oriented programming and got very good at it 20+ years ago. I was doing serious, complex architecture work before I ever heard the term “software architecture”.

As a result of all that time and effort I’ve internalized a great deal of software development practices. I haven’t consciously thought about fundamental principals, OOP concepts or the like in many years. I don’t think about fundamental design patterns or optimization either. They have all become obvious to me now and they get applied automatically. As I write code all of that gets baked in automatically. Heck, I even subconsciously optimize my code, implementation and architectures on various levels with little thought. Its truly amazing what the subconscious can be taught to do. Which is great because having all that be subconscious allows me to consciously focus on business requirements, unusual aspects and the big picture.

As a side note, this is what partially (mostly?) inspired my logo.

Extrapolation & Early Development

I’d imagine anyone can learn to do this level of internalization given enough time. This is why spending a lot of time doing software development for a long time really pays off.

I do sometimes wonder if starting at a very early age makes a difference. Apparently being bilingual from a young age causes long-term changes in brain. Source code is kind of a language, I wonder if that has any long-term impact.

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