I attended Andy Hunt's “Refactor Your Wetware: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” presentation given for the Richmond Java User Group/Central VA Ruby User Group October meeting Wednesday night.  Having just completed this book in September I was very interested in reinforcing what I have learned (and began practicing, ahem, mind mapping) and excited to see the author present this material.

I was impressed with the professional atmosphere and organization at this event.

Andy’s presentation centered around the book, touching on several highlights over the two hour period.  This was largely a rehash for me, which was very good, with a little bit of new material thrown in.  (There is a new Pomodoro book pragprog is publishing so there was a brief overview of Pomodoro included with a plug – which I fully support at free/sponsored events; I had just read the RSS post earlier in the day so I would have been disappointed if it were skipped!)  His slides were good – not distracting – and the presentation was delivered with animation and some really well placed humor.

Points [I remember]:

Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition

Mind mapping (easily my favorite technique I learned from the book)

You cannot execute a great idea if you don’t exercise your brain to get it to produce them – write down your ideas, all of them

Meditation

How context switching and multitasking damages productivity

Have a personal wiki

Book study groups – going to suggest replacing our low value formal code reviews with this in an on-going basis

 

Finally Andy said it may be possible in the near future to get some of pragprog’s non-code books in an audio book format which for anyone who has a long commute is very good news.