Getting Good – Melbourne Geek Night, 18 March 2013.

Here’s a talk I did last night at Melbourne Geek Night, that I call “Getting Good”. It’s an extension of the pseudo Subterranean Homesick Blues style lightning talk that I did once at the Melbourne Scrum and Agile meetup. I thought I would try Prezi out, and it turned out OK, I think. It is a look at how we learn skills, how we progress, and how we get good at them. I dipped into Malcolm Gladwell’s so-called “10,000 hour rule”, linked The Karate Kid with Alistair Cockburn’s Shu-Ha-Ri progression, and then equated this to how I learnt how to Telemark ski. At the end I made mention of how I used to go to Oxford Geek Night, the inspiration for Melbourne Geek Night. The links for further reading can be found on Pinboard. It was also great hearing about tweaky.com and bugherd.com, from Ned and Matt. I hope that my more general talk was a good counterpoint to their accounts of life at their startups. Cheers to Ben, Ben, and Andrew at Thirst Studios for organising the night. I enjoyed it.