Being a software engineer can sometimes feel overwhelming. Really, being a professional in any reasonably complicated industry can feel overwhelming. But the truth is that for most industries, there are some fundamental activities that you can participate in. We kind of talked about these in the last episode, the categorical activities, that if you were to focus on those and improve those, like we talked about in the last episode, then your whole job would improve in step. We're going to talk a little bit about this idea of returning the fundamentals and why it's quite the opposite of doing the same thing over and over. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. I've done something like 1,020 of these episodes of Developer Tea. And it may seem like, from the outside looking in, that what I'm doing is repetitive. Not necessarily the content, but the process. And the motions certainly do look quite the same. I stand in front of the same microphone, and I press the same buttons. I publish to the same. I'm on the same platform. And ultimately, the way that this show gets disseminated doesn't really change all that much. And it may seem like I'm doing the same thing over and over. If you are a software engineer, it may feel like you do the same thing over and over. You write the same kind of code. You run the same kind of tests. You deploy to the same servers. And you have the same kind of concerns that are popping up from your teammates. You do the same kind of work. You do the same meetings day in and day out. And the monotony of that, or the seeming monotony, can be frustrating. But I want to share with you a different perspective on this. Specifically, I want you to start re-encoding in your mind the idea that this repetitive action is actually... 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You may perform the same exact strength training exercise, let's say deadlifts, and the form doesn't change. But you begin to change. And so when you approach the deadlift the next time, nothing necessarily is going to change about the motions that you make. But the context has changed completely. The way you experience it certainly changes, but the capacity, and this is the critical thing, your capacity to perform in that particular activity has increased. You may be writing code that feels like the same for loop for the thousandth time. But after you've repeated this process, you've gone through the repetitive process of writing code over and over and learning a lot about when to use certain techniques and how to refactor. And a bunch of other kind of contextual information you can bring to that process of writing code. The way that you think about that process changes. This probably feels pretty obvious. In some ways it is. Of course, everything around us changes. But I want you to think about this interaction of doing the same thing in a different environment or as a different person. At the same time, you may find yourself bringing together your evolution, bringing together evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, bringing evolution, of your actions, then that is a uniform characteristic. Uniform chaos, as strange as it sounds, provides less of an opportunity for learning. When you have this basis of repeated action, you can kind of visualize layers to the process of performing that particular action. At the very beginning, when you're a complete beginner, you're at that first layer, but as you gain more experience, you move through that layer and you get to deeper layers. Now, when you discard those layers before, you're not ignoring them. It just becomes closer to an automatic response. In other words, you're developing an intuitive sense for how to perform at a deeper layer the same tasks that you have been performing already. As a manager, your very first one-on-one, for example, might feel awkward or like you can't really get a sense for how this person is feeling or what you can do to help them. As you progress, you can start to gain strong intuition or even nuanced details in the way the person is talking to you or nuanced details in the way that they're writing their code. You can start to pick up on these things because the repetition that you've engaged in with these particular actions, has given you the opportunity to develop actual intuition. This perspective combined with what we talked about in the last episode, the metamodeling and steering systems, can help you really focus on making these core activities so much more valuable. Hopefully, you can rediscover that the learning process is not about doing something different every day. It's about opening back those layers of intuition and learning from them. Really focusing in on those fundamental things and everything else becomes ancillary. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, if you want to talk more about these fundamental activities, maybe you want to share what your activities are, you can always reach out on Twitter. We don't talk about that very often, at developerT. You can email me as well, developerT at gmail.com. But the best way is to head over to the developerT discord. Head over to developerT.com slash discord. You can join that community totally free to other software engineers like you who are wanting to get started. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Enjoy your tea.