One of the most popular psychology books among Software Engineers is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I have always been fascinated how we perceive flow as a desired state of mind that has to be entered into and exploited for one's own good.
Ancient programmers tried to control the flow via practices like Pair Programming or Agile. Today, these practices are largely forgotten and I wonder what's the reason. Is is the rise of individualism or weak markets or high costs? I do not know. But I know that everyone has their own flow and each flow has its own quirks, and this is why it's so difficult to change someone else's code.
My way is to understand the quirks of my flow and to communicate it so that others can effectively adapt:
- my flow is slow, with pauses, interruptions and long nights
- my flow is low-level, I prefer JDBC over JPA and JavaScript over Angular
- my flow is compact, I write as little code as possible, and this is probably due to the old carpal syndrome that I cured but which still makes long typing sessions psychologically unconformable
- my flow is sticking to old ideas, circling back to #1, interruptions are a natural way for me to look at my work from a different angle.