Learning by doing

What I learned by messing it up.

A higher level talk on the things programmers learn by doing - how failure should be encouraged, as long as it's at the right place and time. The stuff you do once, royally mess up and learn from.

The best lessons are the ones you learn the hard way.

Presented a RORO Melbourne Newbies Night on the 29th of October, 2014. Please note this talk lacks a lot of context without the speaking associated with it.

Transcript

1. Learning by doing & What I learned by messing it up.
2. I’m @sutto
3. --fail-fast
4. I’ve made a lot of mistakes.
5. git push -f
6. Restarting the wrong server…
7. Tasks that are supposed to send 1 email, sending many…
8. Know what’s easier up front
9. Unknown Unknowns versus Known Unknowns
10. Spend time learning the abstractions
11. If you’re working on layer n,understand layer n-1.
12. Understand encoding.
13. Floats (and JS numbers!)
14. Understand your database
15. And by that, know how indexes work.
16. It’s hard to fix bad data.
17. Design for Failure.
18. and how to deal with it.
19. Monitoring
20. Metrics
21. Exception Tracking!
22. Circuit Breakers
23. Finally, Feedback is important.
24. The faster the loop, the better.