Your Brain on Software Development
summary
A claim: cognitive biases drive many bad engineering outcomes — teams pick the first database they know, chase easy high‑value work, then discover integration or unknown hard parts sink a project (one platform fails after a mid‑rewrite into microservices). Recommended practices: use C4 diagrams to stay abstract until requirements are clear, run spikes and prioritize the hard‑easy effect (do high‑value hard work first), and record choices with an architectural decision register so future you remembers why.
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chapters (32)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:05Who am I
- 3:43Where am I going
- 4:14Cognitive Bias
- 5:37Evolutionary Baggage
- 6:04Your Brain
- 8:48Thinking Fast and Slow
- 14:47System 1 vs System 2
- 15:40Are we logical
- 16:11Cognitive biases
- 17:38The anchoring effect
- 19:51Availability heuristic
- 20:26Summary
- 21:02C for Diagrams
- 23:08Need to Act Fast
- 23:25The Hard Easy Effect
- 26:09Dunning Kruger
- 28:09Imposter Syndrome
- 29:12We want to move fast
- 30:05Fuzzy blob
- 32:21Decision registers
- 33:31Stories patterns
- 36:21Stereotyping
- 37:29Cargo Cults
- 39:34Scala
- 40:35The IKEA Effect
- 41:55Exponential Complexity
- 44:17Fibonacci Numbers
- 44:50Backfire Effect
- 48:09Retraction
- 50:01What can we do
- 51:02Software Architecture for Developers
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