Justin Searls talks with Dave Rael about choosing the most difficult path, heightened insight from challenge, and the pitfalls of local optimization
Justin Searls has two professional passions: writing great software and sharing what he’s learned to help others write even greater software. He helped start a software agency called [Test Double](http://www.testdouble.com), whose crack team of double agents solve complex problems with clean and simple solutions.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the show and Justin Searls
- - Natural language, the difficulties of English language, and parallels and differences between natural languages and computing environments
- - The virtue of slow
- - "Making it hip to be slow"
- - Beware of dogma and helping teams to go well
- - Justin's definition of value
- - Justin on being "lit up" on software and the pitfalls of local optimizations
- - Justin's story of failure - organizational dysfunction, team disconnection, rollback, and a self-destruct button
- - Justin's success stories - big attention and use from a weekend project, creating useful software immersed in the lives of users
- - Justin's book recommendation
- - Justin's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with Justin
Resources:
Justin's book recommendation:
Justin's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
- Step away
- Indicate positive emotion when communicating via text
- Pair program and collaborate even when you think you don't need to - avoid the hacker mentality