Do these questions sound familiar?

• What are the important problems of your field?

• What important problems are you working on?

• If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you … working on it?

They come from a 1986 speech by mathematician and Turing award winner Richard Hamming. Hamming originally asked them in the dining hall at Bell Labs, but they have since inspired other people who are interested in finding the best way to spend their work hours.

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In Making Sense of the Deliberate Practice Debate, I argued that deliberate practice is the best way to get better at a skill, even if you believe that innate ability (talent) plays a significant role in how people become experts. In the next few posts, I’m going to start investigating how software developers can apply deliberate practice to a specific skill: Writing correct, efficient, and maintainable code for a software component given well-defined requirements. But first, let’s take a closer look at that skill.

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