PeterBorah

This reply is extremely late, but I'm annoyed at myself for not having responded at the time, so I'll do it now in case anyone runs across this at some point in the future:

I guess I feel a little trepidation or edge-of-my-seat feeling when I first run a test (I have surprisingly often ended up crossing my fingers), but I try to write tests in a nice modular way, so that I'm never writing more than ~5-10 lines of code before I can test again. I feel a lot more trepidation when I break this pattern, and have a big chunk of new code that hasn't been tested at all yet.

(This is an entirely meta post, which feels like it might not be helpful, but I'll post it anyway because I'm trying to have weaker babble filters. Feel free to ignore if it's useless.

I generally enjoy your writing style, and think it's evocative and clear-in-aggregate. But I find this comment entirely inscrutable. I think there's something about the interaction between your "gesturing" style and a short comment, that doesn't work as well for me as a reader compared to that style in a longer piece where the I can get into the flow of what you're saying and figure out your referents inductively.

Either that or you're referencing things I haven't read or don't remember.)

Agreed. I strongly identify with the description of the Red Knight (and somewhat the description of both the other two knights as well), and was therefore Not Interested in Dragon Army. To the point that I posted some strong critiques of the idea, though hopefully in a constructive manner.

I would be interested in a retrospective of how the people who inhabited that role ended up joining Dragon Army. What was the bug there? I though Duncan was admirably clear about how much it was a non-Red Knight-friendly zone.

I've had a similar experience. IDC was by far my favorite technique at CFAR, and I've maybe done it twice since then? I think some of it is that the formal technique fell away pretty quickly for me: once I learned to pay attention to other internal voices, I found it pretty natural to do that all the time in the flow of my normal thinking, and setting aside structured time for it felt less necessary. (And when I do set aside larger chunks of time, I usually end up just inhabiting the part that gets less "airtime" for a while, rather than having an explicit dialogue between it and another part.)

As a separate comment since it feels like a pretty different thread:

I do have a vague hypothesis that the very first part of the Looking skill might be a prerequisite for IDC and frankly a lot of CFAR techniques. I don't think you need a lot of it, but there feels like there's a first insight that makes further conversations about things downstream from it a million times easier. (For programmers: it feels similar to whatever the insight is that separates people who just can't get the concept of a function from people who can.) It annoys me a lot that I don't yet have a consistent tool for helping people quickly get the first skillpoint in Looking, and fixing that is one of my top pedagogical priorities at the moment.

It definitely doesn't take years of practicing meditation. Though I'm hesitant to speculate on how long it would take on average, because how prepared for the idea people are varies a lot. The hardest step is the first one: realizing that people are talking about things you don't yet understand.

Hmm, maybe this is part of the motivation for test-first programming? Since I was originally trained to do test-first, I don't have this problem, because there are always already tests before I write any code. And I pretty much always know my code works, because it wouldn't be done if the tests weren't passing yet.