How to preserve vision and develop imagination by working with a voice recorder

Good day! Hands have long been reaching out to share experience on Habré, or, behold, GT, the benefit of experience has been accumulated a lot in the scientific field, and in teaching, and in algorithmic creation. But working in a large corporation is tied up in terms of writing articles about developed systems, and writing some general words on a topic is of very little meaning and benefit. However, the idea came to mind to share precisely the approach to work, which allows you to maintain health without losing productivity, and sometimes even significantly increasing it.

The weak point of a programmer - and who is not a programmer these days? - is vision. Code, documents, presentations, diagrams, and other picture-text tinsel, dancing for days on the monitor, very strongly sets vision in a deep minus in diopters and in a delta-neighborhood of zero in acuity. At the same time, I can’t not boast of my own vision, which does not require glasses or the proximity of the object in question, or its size, or significant lighting powers for successful operation. It is possible to save it in this state, largely thanks to the technique for working with the recorder reflected in the title. This approach allows you to work not only without a monitor, but even without a pen with a piece of paper.

In general terms, such a work can be described as follows. If you need to think carefully about some part of the activity, which then, of course, will result in the source code, presentation or text document, then you do not immediately rush to the editor. Yes, many people know that rushing straight to the editor of the development environment is, in general, a child’s, zero, level. One can perhaps call the opening of a text document for writing a work plan the first level of development. On the second level, let’s put a pen with a piece of paper or a whiteboard with a marker (by the way, I like chalk more), because refusing to turn on the computer allows not only to move the development environment further away for a better development of the work plan, but also to give the eyes a few minutes Do not stare at the monitor for tens of minutes. The levels, it should be noted, are completely conditional, taken right at the time of writing the text from my low ceiling, just for some differentiation of approaches of different people. Sometimes it will so flip that you go directly into the code, make very significant changes there - and everything works fine the first time. But this, as it were, suggests that all the planning and thinking took place in the head, and there it sometimes happens in one second.

Actually, I’m writing about the third level of development of preparation for work. You don’t even need to take a pen with a piece of paper, you can just close your eyes and turn on the recorder. Imagination, however, will also have to be activated, but with him, perhaps, programmers usually have everything in order. Now it may seem most pleasant that, in contrast to the approaches of all previous levels, vision is completely at rest here. For example, the first draft of this article I spoke to the recorder, lying with my eyes closed in bed, before bedtime. But the rest of the image perception apparatus is, frankly, not the most pleasant. The sweetest bun is precisely the feeling of the power of work in the head, without involving the outside world. You can simply say that a good practice of preliminary thinking over the work using the recorder is proposed. I'm not talking about that on the way home from work, on a bus, in the subway or in personal transport, it’s best to record your thoughts on a voice recorder. Eh, he said ... And yet, practicing this kind of dictation, at some point you come to an amazing opportunity not only to think over and sketch, but to do all the work in full detail, without resorting to anything other than imagination and a voice recorder.

This could have ended the article. The message is simple: before you write code, rivet a presentation, documentation, or even solve a physical and mathematical problem with rather big formulas, try to take a voice recorder and do all the same activities with your eyes closed. While walking or driving, it’s better not to close your eyes. It turns out that nothing prevents verbally describing the names and parameters of functions, their interaction, their filling, working with memory, indexes of elements in arrays, data types, and even bit content. Nothing prevents just as “in words” and not in fact, taking complex integrals, describing integrands, areas of integration, substitutions, elementary methods of transition for the next equal sign, etc. Such work will really reduce the load on vision and surprise with the capabilities of one’s own, it seemed, already empty,

However, the article does not end there. Bad teacher without life examples. I bought a voice recorder at a time when I had three works at once: teaching mathematics with an assistant load, scientific activity that I wanted to disperse after getting my candidate degree to enter the doctor’s trajectory, and also R&D activity in the field of 3GPP and related standards, for which only and paid some reasonable money, unlike the first two activities.

It was necessary to write a report on Mobile IP technology. Something like a feasibility study. Despite the simplicity of the idea of ​​technology and, generally speaking, the lack of fundamental research, the entire zoo of systems and subsystems containing mobile networks of the third and fourth, at that time generation, as well as Wi-Fi networks and attempts to involve them in the networks of mobile operators, required To create any kind of competent report, dig into such a bunch of IETF, IEEE, and OMA standards that Mom Don't Cry. I just physically began to notice how the house numbers that I could distinguish by looking from the balcony were getting closer and closer, and those that were distinguishable yesterday turned into progressive Progressive JPEG today. Indeed, in addition to reading documents, it was still necessary to fix the learned material somewhere, that is, constantly switch between files, copy, paste, rearrange pieces of text, append, search, where to paste text that came later, but is vital for understanding earlier and etc. Reading in itself is not as tiring as these very throwing between documents, presentations and other electro-waste. Technical standards also have the habit of invoking each other in the most obscene way. The authors, of course, can be understood, but raking all these reference trees with multiple branches, and then breaking their eyes in search of a document with the desired number in a folder on their own computer is a pleasure worthy of the most radical masochist.

And then I took the recorder. Moving on to the next document, he simply pronounced its name and calmly read it, dictating individual quotes, descriptions of pictures and diagrams, and his own thoughts as they read. Periodically, the same picture in the sound file told the general picture, which I understood at the moment, indicating what large and small elements are missing in it. And when I found these elements, I told in the same way where they were found, what they are and how they are built into the whole structure. In such an approach to work, the fact that the overall picture is very effectively drawn up is very much attractive, but at the same time nothing prevents us from scrutinizing any of its small details in detail. And all this is documented for further collection in the final document.

Another example is with formulas. Once I started a search for the equations of motion of a complex mechanical system, but at the same time there was a need to make a 9-hour flight. The recorder, as usual, was in my pocket, and I thought that it would be possible to record at least some initial thoughts about the design and analysis of this system. During the flight, under conditions of shaking, darkness and drowsiness - in ordinary airplane conditions - we managed to think over all the generalized coordinates and connections, directions and zero rays for counting angles, thus introducing a bunch of variables, collecting them in a sickly Lagrangian, taking the necessary private and complete derivatives (see Lagrange mechanics) and do some analysis of the obtained equations of motion, which, of course, represented a set of harmonic oscillators with various kinds of relationships. And all this, almost without opening his eyes. All the necessary things are perfectly described by words, and, being described, are perfectly remembered and manipulated in the imagination no worse than on paper or a blackboard.

Obviously, the recorder at the third level of development is only a kind of crutch for the imagination, which at the fourth level is no longer needed. But the crutch is extremely comfortable, allowing you to open unprecedented horizons. I came to him, generally speaking, trying to jump right up to the fourth level back in high school. My grandfather actively harnessed me to plowing, hilling, weeding and picking potatoes, and at the same time I had to solve physical problems from remote courses at Moscow State University. I had to decide in my mind. In fact, puzzles were usually not solved, but just pondered in general terms, but pondered tasks, as you know, are solved quite naturally. Nevertheless, it does not surprise me at all today that, for example, Stephen Hawking writes books and performs complex calculations, being a little more mobile than a cucumber;

Add more about voice recorders. All the charm of this device is difficult to evaluate, having only some kind of dictaphone application on the smartphone. I use the device myself (can I have a bit of advertising?) Olympus VN-713PC, which is not a professional tool, but allows you to work just blindly: start and pause recording, rewind recorded tracks, speed up playback and change its volume - all the buttons are pleasant to the touch, without Fears of touching the touch screen in the wrong place.

And more about editing text. I wrote an article from a dictaphone blank in one run. In the next passage, I read it to the recorder, again, without trying to correct the printed text, which requires periodic re-readings in order to avoid distortion of readability and logic by corrections. At the same time, however, a modified text is read to the recorder: sentences are corrected, new ones are added. At the third iteration, I listen to the recorder and paste the edits into the printed text. The recorder allows during dictation by pressing a button to insert marks directly on the sound track, between which it is easy to move. For example, this text at the first re-reading required only three edits. As a result, listening to the whole thing for the sake of finding modifications is a bit wasteful, so it's convenient to use the movement between the labels. The second and third step is possible and, in general, preferably repeated several times. Double accelerated listening does not take much time, but it allows you to build a fairly nice text.

Well, the very last. Dictation develops speech and oratorical abilities, which is still appreciated in the modern world, but is often monstrously underdeveloped by programmers and other hard workers of a not very conversational front.

Thank you for attention. I hope someone will master it.

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