This year I was very thankful that my employer Pusher sponsored my ticket to Droidcon UK 2019! These are the notes I took at the different talks I attended:

Keynote: Coding Like an Althete — Christina Lee

Christina spoke to us about the similarities between athletes and programmers (who she then refers to as Brathletes as we’re using our brains), and some things us brathletes can learn from athletes.

Things I learned:
- Programmers are more like athletes than I thought; we have team uniforms, we announce when we’re leaving and joining new teams, we get compensated $$$, our managers want to get the most out of us.
— But we don’t really have coaches :( Some companies offer nutritional coaches, but what about other crucial performance enhancing elements like sleep?
— Programmers often only get career feedback once a year — not after every game like sports people.
- The Monday Morning Quaterback — on monday they look at the game that was played on the weekend to work out everything that went wrong so they can determine which pieces they want to focus on to improve for next time.
- People don’t pursue passions, they do things they’re good at which in turn makes them happier. People who have been in a role longer tend to be happier with that role.
- Sleep is super important. After being awake for 19 hours straight you have the same symptoms as someone who is drunk.
- Flow is important for people to feel satisfied, less stressed, and perform better but our current offices and ways of working are set not set up to help this. On average people switch tasks every 10 minutes, and half of those switches are self imposed.
- 5 tips to improve things
— Make your whole day as flow — schedule time for interruptions / twitter
— Train your memory — your memory is a muscle — concentration can be grown
— Block like tasks together to minimise attention residue
— Write down unfinished tasks — make a plan on how to finish these which reduces the attention residue left by switching tasks often
— Create a shutdown ritual to transition out of work mode — free time is crucial! …