I come to realize over time that there are a lot of difficulty for individuals that want to either learn software development to get to their goal. Whether that goal is to write a small program to do some specific task or on the other spectrum to have a new found career as a software developer, or somewhere in the middle.

What I Believe

  • That if someone is passionate about software development there should be a path to what they want to achieve.
  • No matter how young or old you are in your career - you can build skills in this area towards your goal
  • There is a lot of unnecessary obstacles that get in the way of our goals sometimes hidden to us in cognitive biases.

What are cognitive biases?

Wikipedia defines cognitive bias -
A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own “subjective social reality” from their perception of the input

Wha… OK in normal speak I have heard it best described using an analogy. It is almost as how we see the world as if we are wearing a large pair of glasses. These glasses might represent how we were raised, maybe what others have told us, maybe our personal beliefs and from experiences. The idea is other people have different pair of glasses which they see the world from a different lens based of their beliefs, experiences, etc. The challenge is to see outside those lens and challenge your existing beliefs and perspectives.

My goal

My goal with these blog post is to challenge your personal cognitive biases and see if I can help you move past some of these that are causing obstacles towards your goals. (If it is still confusing let me know and I can follow up in another article)

I also want to provide actionable steps to move you further towards your goal. I have a lot of topics already created for this series. If you like a topic discussed or you have your own issue you would like me to address - send me a note on twitter @natebruneau. I would be happy to add it to the list articles I am going to publish.

Side Note: I am a big fan of the book “Thinking Fast and Slow” By Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Price Winner for Economics). This is one of the best books on cognitive bias. My second runner up is “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell.

Note: These are my personal views and not views of my employer. Also my tips/tricks are not planned to be prescriptive but rather à la carte where you can pick and choice what you want to try that might help your in your journey.

My blog notes

My blog will never have ads or be monetized by clicks. What I would rather prefer is you share the content with your friends and give me feedback on what you would like to hear or if the content has been useful to you. Someday I might have a button to click to send me a beer/coffee in monetary form as a thank you but you have my guarantee there will be no ads specifically around data mining as I am a big fan of online user privacy.

Thank you - As for a preview of the next in the series - it will be on the bias “I have no time in the week to improve on my goal of being a software developer”