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Trisha Gee Developer Productivity Advocate, Gradle Beyond Inspiration: Turning Learning into Action What do you do with what you’re learning?

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Person With Opinions Trisha Gee

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Person With Opinions Trisha Gee …and Author

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Three days at a conference learning interesting things!

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What are you going to do with everything you’ve learnt?

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“In the modern office context, [knowledge workers] tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation.” Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout Cal Newport

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This means that you are, by default, ALWAYS TOO BUSY

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This means that you are, by default, ALWAYS TOO BUSY

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Your management is pretty happy with this

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Your management is pretty happy with this

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Your management is pretty happy with this

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“Research indicates that when organizations overload employees, base their incentives primarily on the amount of time they work, and excessively monitor their activities, productivity and efficiency actually drop.” https://hbr .org/2023/03/beware-a-culture-of-busyness

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By Amy (Trisha’s daughter)

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AND you’re too busy to make the changes that will make you less busy

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“[Knowledge workers] exist at that point of… having too much to do, but… just manageable enough to avoid reform.” Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout Cal Newport

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To make the most of what you learn here, you will need to make some changes

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Start Small

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Do not try to re-write the whole application in Rust

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How to grow a Culture of Continuous Learning Brown Bags Hack days and Hackathons 20% Time Experimentation Sprints

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How to grow a Culture of Continuous Learning Brown Bags Hack days and Hackathons 20% Time Experimentation Sprints

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How to grow a Culture of Continuous Learning Brown Bags Hack days and Hackathons 20% Time Experimentation Sprints

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How to grow a Culture of Continuous Learning Brown Bags Hack days and Hackathons 20% Time Experimentation Sprints

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How to grow a Culture of Continuous Learning Brown Bags Hack days and Hackathons 20% Time Experimentation Sprints

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Choose where to spend your energy

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I will make those work requirements easier

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I will make the team more efficient or more effective

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Everyone else has been going on about how cool or interesting I am

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You want to learn about this

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Why are you doing this?

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Focusing on the WHY will help you pick the WHAT

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…and help you sell it to the boss

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Talk the language of the business

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The business doesn’t care about the HOW

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"I want time to learn the latest Java features."

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The business cares about outcomes

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"Using virtual threads could let us handle more requests with the same hardware. This would improve the app’s performance and cut our cloud costs"

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What are the business goals? Increase revenue Improve customer satisfaction Beat the competition Decrease costs

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What are the business goals? Increase revenue Improve customer satisfaction Beat the competition Decrease costs

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What are the business goals? Increase revenue Improve customer satisfaction Beat the competition Decrease costs

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What are the business goals? Increase revenue Improve customer satisfaction Beat the competition Decrease costs

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What are the business goals? Increase revenue Improve customer satisfaction Beat the competition Decrease costs

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The ability to experiment is a critical part of innovation and creating business value.” Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

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“The team will spend [x time] [prototyping/ researching] [some thing]. Our hypothesis is that using [technology/tool/approach] will result in [faster time to market/higher quality code/better performance benchmarks].”

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An experiment has:

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A hypothesis

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“We can ship code more quickly if…”

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A method

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Where to experiment? Pet projects Prototypes Build system / deployment tools / CD pipeline Automated tests Internal tools New project or service

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Success criteria

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“25% fewer exceptions in the logs”

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An outcome

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Success!

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Fail

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…and this is OK!

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Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.” Test-Driven Development: By Example Kent Beck

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The value is what you learnt

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Timebox your experiments

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“We spent 6 months on this and didn’t get anywhere” == “This experiment failed to deliver business value”

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“The team will spend one day a sprint working with different AI coding assistants on their own pet projects. We’ll record our experiences once a month, and at the end of the quarter we’ll use the results to decide which, if any, we should standardise on.”

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Paying the cost of learning speeds you up in the long run

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Learning drains cognitive resources, but after you’ve learned it, using the now-automatic knowledge and skill is fast and effortless. Knowledge in the head trades slower learning time now for faster using time later.” Badass: Making Users Awesome Kathy Sierra

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Learning stuff makes you better at learning stuff

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Adapting to an ever-accelerating sequence of new technologies also trains the mind to explore and master complex systems.” Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter Steven Johnson

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Learning and trying new things is FUN

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Research shows: Fun is good for business

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Research shows: Fun is good for business

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Trying new things should benefit your organisation

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This is your cheat sheet Increase revenue Improve customer satisfaction Beat the competition Decrease costs

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Use experiments to set boundaries and goals

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Organizing our work into a series of small, informal experiments and gathering feedback to inform our learning allows us to proceed more deliberately and to explore the problem and solution spaces that we inhabit.” Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster David Farley

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The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses Eric Ries

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Thank You! tinyurl.com/bynd-insp