During 2022, a lot of things happened. I graduated from university, got my first job, and moved to a new one, the second one being my first international experience within the programming industry. While working, I also continued the development of my graduation thesis with the help of my friend and mentor Edil Medeiros. All these experiences were great on their own, but they don’t even get close to how good the idea of a study group was.

Exploiting the Environment

On May, I talked to a co-worker about how my lack of displine profoundly affects my ability to start/continue/finish projects. I already noticed that the obligation of having to report to a third party heavily improves my performance. This colleage confessed that he also suffers from the same problem. We started thinking on how we could exploit such attribute to revert the natural destination of the situation – getting nothing done and start accumulating frustration in a daily basis.

Of course, this does not justify the lack of a routine and the endurance required to not miss a single task previously planned. However, we noticed that given that our behavior is influenced by our surrounding environment it seems easy to just try to modify it and gather the results afterwards. For instance, if both of us have to report to each other about a specific duty, this would increase the chances of both of us of accomplishing the task. This informal approach, i.e., two or more friends adding extra obligations to each other, is not 100% bullet-proof because the worst output is to one participant to be embarassed because he/she has nothing to report.

We decided that the worst case scenario was already enough for both of us and such strategy should be tested. This led to the creation of the study group Dr.Nekoma.

Dr.Nekoma

Named after two great japanese animations (Dr.Stone and Haikyuu!), the purpose of this study group, at least at first glance, would be to create an environment in which a group of people could participate in projects together, each participant commiting himself to getting online in specific days of the week. Hence, because everybody else would be doing the same, this would create the perfect scenario for projects to bloom and sky rocket.

We started with only two participants (me and my colleague). This, however, didn’t last very long. Rapidly we added more members, both coming from work. With more people involved, more ideas were shared and faster projects started to get done. Meanwhile, another property got clear to me: a group of enthusiasts have a great tendency of generating a positive feedback loop. In other words, one participant getting excited about a project provokes other enthusiastic participants to get more excited and vice-versa.

The practical effect of this property was that our sessions of pair programming started to increase in length. As we were about to reach a steady state of getting blocked, someone insisted to fix the current bug just to be able to see a certain feature working on the project. The remaining members, already kinda exhausted, got infected with this virus and continue on helping to debug.

Not only that, but we also had the opportunity to hone our communication abilities on how to explain problems and solutions to other developers and listen to their alternative ideas. Knowing how to debate in the technology space is important to create more efficient solutions and understand the drawbacks that each approach has.

Later on, with more people getting involved in the group, not only more topics were added, such as philosophy, but also new activities. We started doing presentations within the group to enhance even more our communication and to train ourselves on how to present certain topic that left us awe. This led to discoveries of such topics by the other participants while generating a healthy discussion with questions and debates about what was presented. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that such frictions do not happen because participants want to be right, but because they are trying to find some sort of truth about what is being discussed. This leads to a very humble and thought-provoking environment.

Conclusion

Dr.Nekoma has a profile on Github, Youtube, and on Twitch. Since May 2022 until the day of writing, we’ve accumulated 78 youtube videos, going across several programming languages, and several domains in the computer science space. Multiple presentations were done about various subjects. Our most recent project, spatula, is an order of magnitude more interesting and complex than anything I have done to this day during university and research. I have a gigantic source of knowledge and motivation that induces me to be even more hungry, to not stop the learning process no matter what.

I’m very grateful for this group that allows me to express my nature of being truly interested in computer science. My only regret is not having this idea sooner.