Big picture, team work
I like this fragment, Joel on Software, reviewing “Dreaming in Code”:
Eyes work using a page fault mechanism. They?re so good at it that you don?t even notice.
You can only see at a high-resolution in a fairly small area, and even that has a big fat blind spot right exactly in the middle, but you still walk around thinking you have a ultra-high resolution panoramic view of everything. Why? Because your eyes move really fast, and, under ordinary circumstances, they are happy to jump instantly to wherever you need them to jump to. And your mind provides this really complete abstraction, providing you with the illusion of complete vision when all you really have is a very small area of high res vision, a large area of extremely low-res vision, and the ability to page-fault-in anything you want to see?so quickly that you walk around all day thinking you have the whole picture projected internally in a little theatre in your brain.
The article then somehow gets into considering team work issues. Now, this one I feel quite often (even though not related to programming):
I can?t tell you how many times I?ve been in a meeting with even one or two other programmers, trying to figure out how something should work, and we?re just not getting anywhere. So I go off in my office and take out a piece of paper and figure it out. The very act of interacting with a second person was keeping me from concentrating enough to design the dang feature.
…but I always thought that it is some kind of proof of my bad team working skills and do-it-yourself approach.
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