Coder’s Eye

Any programmer will tell you that one of the characteristics of really getting into a programming "flow" is that your mind is completely engaged. I think of it sort of like a stack. I have all these small tasks which need to be accomplished, and which can’t be put off because they’ll block my progress.

So, I stick the current task on the top of the mental stack, and do the little diversion. The diversion might have more diversions which get stacked on top. But pretty much I do them in last-in-first-out order. For example, today I was programming an email confirmation system in Django.

A stacked task example

• I was testing my form template, and wanted to make it both pretty and XHTML valid (Stack: 1).
• To do that, I needed to make a base template which the confirmation forms would extend (task 2).
• The base template really should use CSS for ease of formatting, and for standards compliance (Stack: 1,2).
• Oh, but CSS in Django really should be served by the media server, yet I haven’t mapped the media URL on my development server. I should do that now, or else it won’t resolve (Stack: 1,2,3).
• Start NetInfo Manager, map it (Stack 1,2,3,4-complete).
• Add the media url domain to Apache as a virtual host (Stack: 1,2,3,5-complete).
• Bounce apache, test media domain (Stack: 1,2,3,6)
• Troubleshoot why apache didn’t bounce properly - bad vhost line (Stack 1,2,3,6,7-complete)
• Bounce apache, test media domain, success (Stack: 1,2,3,6-complete)
• Test Django CSS from template, hard coding media URL (Stack: 1,2,3,8-complete)
• Oh, but hard-coding is foolish when the media URL is stored in the settings. Is there a way to use the settings? (Stack: 1,2,3,9)
• No, but I can write a templatetag. (Stack: 1,2,3,9,10)
• Lookup template tag docs, write one to do media URLs for me. (Stack: 1,2,3,9,10,11-complete)
• Test new template tag. (Stack: 1,2,3-complete,9-complete,10-complete)
• Test base template with new tag. (Stack: 1,2-complete)
• Test form, extending base template. (Stack: 1-complete)

If you are a programmer, you’ll recognize this style of thinking. If not, and you’ve managed to read this far, perhaps you’ll understand a bit more why we get flustered when people walk up to ask questions. If a programmer is managing a stack of tasks 5 or 6 items deep, it gets easy to lose the thread of what is going on.

I’ve been working for years at getting better about interruptions. I love the flow state, but I think that we programmers make it too fragile when we try to keep everything in our head. The thing is that always seems like you are almost there, so the time to write down anything about your stacked task is a waste of time. I’ve been fighting that tendency, with varying degrees of success.

For quite a while, I’ve been doing this mostly by keeping an engineering notebook. That way I can scribble notes which will - sometimes - lead me back to the path if I get distracted. Today I tried a new technique, which was to use the excellent little app Sidenote for OSX. It is just a little "Sticky" style note taker which lives on the side of your screen. It minimizes when not in use, and it autosaves all the time. That’s a nice bit right there, you don’t even have to think about saving.

Basically, I’ve started using it for two things. 1) To track my "stack" and 2) to track needed/possible future refactorings. I haven’t gotten fully in the habit yet, but I had a six hour long coding-flow session today, and Sidenote was a very helpful part of that. The stack is empty and I have one refactor to do. Plus, I got to code my heart out, which always feels great.

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