Stephen C Young - Professional Profile

Since I was young I always preferred teaching myself to learning from a structured syllabus.

This didn’t always make me popular with my teachers. I guess sleeping through the whole of Romeo and Juliet in an English class doesn’t make a great impression. On the other hand I formed an obsession with always researching something.

Over the years these obsessions would jump from topic to topic ranging from physics to lean manufacturing. Photography to functional programming. Cognition to physiology and strength training. Kitesurfing to fire poi. My obsessions may be random but are always led by my curiosity.

Over time I noticed that I was forming connections and finding patterns in unrelated fields and using knowledge I gained from studying the rudiments of things like cognitive psychology when trying to figure out why I was seeing certain behaviours in the teams I was working in.

I'm interested in communicating those underlying principles and connections in a way that is useful to others.

I have been working as a programmer, architect and manager for the last 12 years so there is a strong bias to helping junior programmers and software development teams improve.

I focus on underlying principles and not technologies.

	23 Jul 2015	First Prize: Best "Everything Else" Article of June 2015 with Why You Must Tame Complexity to Become a Better Programmer
	24 Apr 2015	Second Prize: Best "Everything Else" Article of March 2015 with How to Become a Better Programmer by Learning How You Understand Code
	2 Jan 2015	First Prize: Best "Everything Else" Article of November 2014 with Why Your Code Is So Hard to Understand