Presentation: Incrementally Refactoring Your Habits With Psychology

I build developer tools at GitHub. More broadly, I make technology more inclusive and accessible for people who have traditionally been left out.

When I was learning about data structures, it struck me how beautiful some of them were. I really love the idea of taking something that's generated by computer and trying to reproduce that by hand - both to get it into my head and to show my vision of how this can work to other people. I made a whole series. I was already a painter and artist learning about computer science, this inspired me to see if I could marry fine art and computer science.

I read a study recently, saying that people think that the part of your brain that you use when you're writing code is the math part, but actually, it’s the part that's related to language. And that made complete sense to me because one of the things I plan on talking about in my talk is about how writing code is an artistic process. And some of the productivity hacks that I'm talking about come from my time as an artist.

A couple of years ago, when I was working at Pinterest, my manager said “You need to double the amount of code that you're writing if you want to get that Senior Engineer promotion”. Some of that obviously was changing my focus because at the time I was mentoring a new grad and three interns.

I wanted to take a research-based, iterative, scientific, experimental approach to the amount of code I was writing. I wanted to understand what are the gaps that are preventing me from being productive by looking at current research and then figuring out ways to apply that in my life. I had one iteration of that when I worked at Pinterest where I was able to double my output.

Then I started at GitHub a couple months ago and became aware of another large gap in how I was thinking about things. I started on the ATOM team, and I learned about all these cool things that an editor could do. Then I realized by working with some of my teammates that the way I was using my editor could be improved. I was less efficient than they were, so I underwent another iteration of how to change my habits.

I am so excited to present some of these learnings to the audience as a framework that they could use to identify gaps in their own efficiency and address that from several different angles.

Senior engineers, architects. I’m hoping this will be a “tent pole” talk - in some ways people of all different experience levels still want to grow and get better and iterate on their habits.  People who are hungry for self-improvement will probably get more out of this talk. I am not going to be covering very 101-level text editor shortcuts (find, find-and-replace, comment, open files) because I’m assuming most people in the audience already know those tips.

I want them to walk away with at least one productivity trick they didn’t know about before, and a plan for how to apply this trick in their own life.

I will talk about a bunch of things I did, how I thought they were going to work out and then how it actually worked out when I put this into practice. Hopefully, people leave with the theory and the practice.

There's one section on research-backed principles of making habits stick, like social accountability. Then plans using behaviorist principles like positive reinforcement. I'm also citing studies for all of these relevant things. And then there's the editor workflow tips section and there's the things that happen outside.

Basically, you need sort of an understanding of what you're doing, like keeping a work log of what you're working on, so you can understand where you're slow. Where I thought I was slow was not actually where I was slow in practice.

I hope audience members walk away with at least one idea that they didn't have before for how to increase their productivity.

How can we keep marginalized people safe online? We do more and more of our communication online, and social media is not very safe for anybody (especially, if you're a person of color, if you're a woman, if you're an LGBT person).