I read a really cool book recently. OK, I listened to it. I’ve recently discovered audio books, which are an awesome to be able to read during a commute, or in my case, while painting the house.

The book is Brain Rules by John Medina. It’s a great introduction to the way the human brain works. It covers the biology of the brain, and much of evolutionary origins of its physiology, and human behavior. It’s fascinating enough by itself, but it really gives some good insights on memory and learning that are very applicable to programmers.

One of the most useful things I learned from the book is how to take advantage of the way the brain stores memories to learn new concepts and programming languages faster. Programmers need to learn new things all the time. Whether it’s a new function, or a new version of a language, or a completely new language, the things we need to learn are not the same as the things our brain has evolved to learn. Our brain really needs to struggle to store complex concepts that are not related to our immediate needs, but we can give it a hand.

I find the best way to learn a new language or concept is to use it immediately. If that means putting down a book mid-chapter and writing your own version of a function right away, then do it. But don’t just write a generic “Hello World” type function. Write a function that displays your favorite Monty Python line, add a big screen-capture of the show, and make sure everything is big and bold on the page. You’ll have a much better chance of remembering the code you wrote, if the output is memorable.

When I was first exposed to ColdFusion, my company hired a trainer to come in and teach us the basic course. This is almost 10 years ago, and I still remember some of that code line for line. It wasn’t elaborate output that he used – it was the variable names. He named every variable “Jimmy”. It wasn’t much, but he did it with such a straight face, that it was hilarious, and in turn, memorable. Building functions called getJimmy(), saveJimmy(), killJimmy() was enough to remember those functions forever.

Jimmy up some of your code. You’ll be glad you did.