I found out about this book in a seemingly unlikely place, Mark Rosewater’s design column Making Magic. Not that unlikely for me though because Mark Rosewater is one of my heroes. I enjoy reading almost every one of his columns. His writing on elegance and the many other aspects of design is applicable to all matters of thought engineering.
What’s all this gassing on about some trading card game designer, isn’t this an internet programming blog? This brings me to my point:
That’s Not My Area
Some of the biggest breakthroughs come from the cross-pollination of ideas: what does orange farming have in common with a web application? What does biology have in common with computation?
The Right Answer
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one we have.
Believing that there is only one right answer can be incredibly stiffling to creativity. Settling for the first answer that works will get you part way there as a programmer, but how often is the first answer the best answer?
Follow the Rules
Sacred Cows make great steaks. — Richard Nicolosi, Businessman
Just because an idea was absolutely right in the past doesn’t mean that it is guaranteed to be right today. The qwerty keyboard layout was designed to prevent typewriter jams by slowing down the typist. When was the last time you experienced a jam on your keyboard? How about repetitive stress injury? Problems change with the times.
To Err is Wrong
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. — James Joyce
Software development is about making errors… constantly. If know a developer who isn’t making any errors then he isn’t writing any programs. How many things do you learn when everything appears to work? It often takes 50 errors to get to the first right answer and 5000 more to get to one of the best answers.
Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head has a list of ten mental locks that can prevent creativity. There’s a whole lot more in the book than just that though. So go ahead, read it.
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