Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and in today's episode we're talking about the value of the first guideline. Every once in a while at Whiteboard we gather around for a birthday celebration. Recently we celebrated a birthday and a lot of times this happens in the morning and we have breakfast. On this particular morning we gathered around and had pancakes. While I very much enjoy pancakes I decided to turn them down because I'm on a different diet. I have a specific diet that I'm following. One of the developers at Whiteboard looked at me and said, It's amazing how much of a difference even one rule can make. I was taken aback by this very simple concept. and what he was saying was that his diet because he has no rules whatever he sees he generally is he kind of makes the decision at that moment of whether or not he wants to make that thing a part of his diet for the day and it's usually not based on anything other than a gut instinct or maybe his taste at that moment his hunger level at that moment and we we talked about this a little bit and I think it's a really interesting insight and that's why I wanted to share with you on today's episode the value of the first guideline or you can think of this as the value of the first analysis and there's a lot of things that we do as developers and we do them kind of without analyzing them right we we pick an editor and then we don't really analyze whether or not that editor is the best editor for us today and what this can lead to is stagnation but the moment that you have a single guideline in place the moment you create a single rule the moment that you add one moment of thinking one question to your process a very simple thing happens and we're going to talk about what that simple thing is and why it's so effective to have just that first rule you know the difference between one rule and two is significantly smaller than having no rules and one rule right the jump is massive the effect on your behavior the effect on your decisions when you have a single guideline in place is massive why is that well we'll talk about why in just a moment right after we talk about today's awesome sponsor linode if you've heard me talk about leno before I want you to listen up a little bit extra careful because linode is changing their offering and it's going better for you it used to be that linode's plans start at ten dollars a month but they have a five dollar plan for a one gigabyte server this is plenty for most of your side projects by the way a gigabyte of ram is what we're talking about they have a five dollar plan that's what their 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server is more than enough for your personal for your personal site if you are not doing something like a blog or even if you just have a simple portfolio up this is a perfect way to invest in that little bit of branding for yourself go and check it out spec.fm slash linode thank you again linode for sponsoring today's episode of developer t so we're talking about what the value of the first guideline is the value of that very first rule that you institute for a given decision so i discussed my diet decisions if you have a very simple question that you ask yourself before you eat something right and in a moment we'll talk about other other scenarios where this applies but if you quite simply ask yourself do i really want to eat that or does that really is that really going to satisfy my craving today if you ask yourself that simple rule what you're doing this is the effective part of what is happening this is the jump that's happening that makes the first one so important and the second one less important than the first you're taking this decision out of your subconscious decision making in other words you're kind of off the cuff or uh without analyzing this this quick decision making you're taking it out of that and running it through your slower thinking right you're running it through uh your more anal analyzing brain the thing that informs what you do so think about it this way if you originate a thought if you have a simple analysis that creates a judgment call so me looking at those pancakes and analyzing whether or not they fit my diet something i've decided to follow and when i recognize that they didn't fit my diet now i have an original kind of instruction right this is something that's created in my in the thinking part of my brain the conscious thinking part of my brain i've created an instruction for myself that otherwise wouldn't be there and if i didn't have that instruction then the decision that i make is not going to be informed by my thinking not going to be informed by analysis or by a longer term uh understanding of what i want but rather by a shorter term more uh gut instinct or perhaps something that is built up by experience so i've had pancakes before i know that i like the taste and so therefore i'm just going to eat the pancake right this is not something that we really have to think about for a very long time and i'm not going to be able to because it's kind of the the lowest barrier the easiest thing to do is to just trust our experience or trust that very first thought the pancake sounds good to me now i know we've talked about diet quite a bit on the show part of the reason is because everyone experiences uh eating decisions right we all have to eat something but this applies to so many other areas of our life as a developer obviously this applies to the types of tools we use it applies to even the momentary or the moment-to-moment decisions we make in our code. For example, we talk about naming on the show a lot. In fact, in the last episode, we talked about the difficulty of naming and folklore in your code. A very simple guideline that can take you from writing really terrible code to pretty decent code is around this naming structure. You can ask yourself the simple question, does this variable name or does this function name, does this name that I've chosen communicate well? If you ask yourself that one question, the quality of your code is going to increase dramatically. You don't have to learn all the design patterns in the world to make a big jump in the quality of your code. You're instituting a very simple one-step guideline. The reason for this is because... Instead of just writing out your stream of consciousness or stream of unconscious way of thinking about the code, you're now asking yourself a meta-question about the design of the code, where the implicit guideline was, does this code work? Does this code accomplish something that I wanted to accomplish? But the explicit question that you're now instructing yourself to pay attention to, this explicit guideline is, not only does the code... need to function, but it must also communicate well. And the implicit thing, obviously, you're not going to stop writing the code until it's actually working, because then it's not really valuable at all, right? The implicit decision for me was, I need to eat food at some point today. And the explicit decision, the explicit thing that I had to instruct myself to do was follow the particular diet. So there are tons of these... little, small guidelines that you can put in place, and you can think about them ahead of time and put them in place so that even the most simple decisions can run through your thinking brain, right? So spending money, for example. If you ask yourself a simple question like, do I really need to spend my money on this thing? Rather than just kind of spending money whenever you feel like it, now you have a way of thinking about the money. You spend. And the jump that you're making from your unconscious or your simple decision making to your analytical decision making, you're going to see massive, massive effects by simply putting that very first guideline in place. Now, I don't want to miscommunicate. Putting these guidelines in place and asking the right question, having the right guideline in place is not easy. It requires some work. It requires more mental. It requires more energy. It is a decision. So it's going to cause faster decision fatigue if you have a guideline for every single thing that you're trying to do in a day. But for the things that matter, for the things that are affecting your life significantly, it's important that you actually have these guidelines. It's going to change the way you think, change the way you act, because you're moving your instruction away from your unconscious thinking into your conscious thinking. And that's where you can actually get. This is where you can be productive and change, affect change in your own life. And change is important. Progress is important. It's important that you cultivate your ability to analyze your decisions. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you, of course, to Linode, who is upgrading their plans for you. You can now get a gigabyte for a $5 a month plan. And by the way, you're going to get four months, by the way. Four months worth of credit. On that one gigabyte plan for free. If you use the code developer tea 2017, that's an entire season. That's like a quarter of it's more than a quarter of the year. So go and check out what Linode has to offer to you as a developer and a listener of developer tea spec.fm slash Linode. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring today's episode. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this discussion on the thinking part of our brain, moving our actions to be informed by some level of action. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I'd love to hear from you. You can find me on Twitter at at developer tea and at Jay Cottrell. That's J C U T R E L L. And if you have questions or comments, you can email me at developer tea at gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of developer tea. And until next time, enjoy your tea.