As part of my effort not to repeat mistakes I have tried to build a habit in my professional – and personal – life to look for ways to be better at what I do. I recently rediscovered how much you can learn when you try doing something you know well backwards: I drove on the left side of the road.
By driving on the left I discovered how many basic driving habits I have that are built around driving on the right. The clearest being that the whole time I was in New Zealand I never knew if anyone was behind me, and the whole time I couldn’t figure out why. The mirrors on the car worked just fine, but it turned out I wasn’t looking at them. Driving home from the airport after we returned to the US I realized that every few seconds my eyes jump to the upper right of my vision to check the mirror. In New Zealand I spent the whole time glancing at the post between the windshield and the driver’s side window (which had seemed massive to me while I was there) instead of the mirror. It made me conscious of my driving habits in a way I haven’t been in years, and as a consequence, I think it’s made me a better driver. I’m thinking about little details again; I’ve been more aware of where I am on the road and what I’m doing to keep track of the other cars around me.
A few years ago I was watching videos from the MIT Algorithms course to refresh some of my basics, and because I wanted to know what had been added in the decade since I’d taken that class at Hamilton. During the review of QuickSort the professor mentioned that it wasn’t originally a divide-and-conqueror process, but a loop based approach meant to work on a fixed length array (so you could use a fixed block of memory). And as I recall he suggests that the students should work out the loop based version. So riding on the train home from work I pieced it together, and found that it’s an elegant process. It’s not something I ever expect to have cause to implement, but it did help me improve my thinking about when to use recursive functions vs when to use a loop, and helped me think about when to use recursion, loops, and other tools for processing everything in a list. There was a session by John Kary at DrupalCon this year on rethinking loops that pushed me again to revise some of how I made those decisions. Again his talk took the reverse view of much of my previous thinking and was therefore very much worth my time.
If you’re feeling like you are in a good groove on something, try doing it backwards and see what you discover.
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