In the December 23, 2020 show of the Developer Tea podcast, Jonathan Cutrell (@jcutrell) talks about how our brain makes things invisible to ourselves.

Let me tell you how I experience this, what I do about it for certain areas and why it is important know keep an eye out for these cases.

Why the brain makes things invisible

Sure, the first thing people ask is “why on earth would my brain hide things from me?”. Probably because an experience was to traumatic for example. This is maybe the psychological cause number one “known” to the general public. It’s the the story of countless books and movies.

However, the brain hides a lot more every single second you are awake. It does not bother me every single second, that my keyboard is black, that in my periferal view the notification LED of my mobile is blinking or how taking the next breath works. The brain would simply be overwhelmed.

The result of such information overload can be seen in some people within the autistic spectrum. Their filters don’t work the same way as mine for example and thus they might seem non receptive to direct attempts of interaction because for them the other human contacting them might be as (un-)important as the realization that for example the pen they are holding is blue.

However, we’re not only talking about short term filters but also things we have done for such a long time, that we don’t need to think about them anymore. From a developer’s point of view that might be touch typing, using a mouse, creating a for-loop in five different programming languages etc. .

Still, at some point we had to learn these things, and they were visible to our brain - making them work required a high mental effort.

Why you should keep an eye out for certain invisible things

Jonathan mentions that for developers it is highly important to keep certain things visible to themselves or at least shine a light on them again from time to time.

The reason behind this is, as he says is that long term devs “plateau on a level” in certain areas, and forget how long they needed to get there. For example, at some point you just know by heart when to use which loop type or recursion. Even if you need to learn the syntax for them in a new language the concept is already in your mind.

This might contribute to your personal level of Impostor syndrome (wikipedia) which is highly common among software developers.

Feeling a little guilty on not keeping up with the latest tech is quite normal for devs who want to do the best job and know they need to keep learning to stay on to of the game.

But it should never rise to a level that hinders you in getting forward with your career.

What I do to un- or recover the invisible

I have - for three years now - kept a mindmap on what I re-/learned each day. Some of the days are empty, but it’s rare that a week goes by that I don’t put in at least one thing.

The whole thing started when I came to a SoCraTes Conference and held a session on “What did you learn since last SoCraTes”, mainly because I exactly did not know this. Apart from the real things people did learn we also discussed how to keep track of learnings and thus “make them visible” to ourselves.

I have extended this digital version with an analog Bullet Journal in the middle of last year. In there I now have a tracker for each month on how much time I spend on learning about which topics.

For me it works great, the only question I’m still asking myself is, if I should get rid of the mindmap and completely replace it with the “BuJo”.

Maybe at the end of 2021 I have an answer to that ;)