It may seem a million miles away
But it gets a little closer everyday

1.

The code base I work with is large, amorphous, and ugly. By now I’ve cleaned out the obvious junk (unused variables and methods, commented-out code, files that weren’t used). But the rest is still in a bad state. There are 3000-line classes and 500-line methods, and lots of copy-paste code.

Ugly code makes me feel uncomfortable, anxious, tense. It’s like an itch, or an unpleasant noise. I have clean it up because I couldn’t stand the knowledge that I’d have to look at this every day for months, or years.

Cleaning it up on the other hand gives me such a feeling of relief. Refactoring is a pleasure. I refactor when I am bored. I take a break not by eating ice cream, or going for a long lunch, or going out shopping, but by setting aside my main coding tasks and refactoring instead.

2.

The house and garden are a never-ending project. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. Even though I normally get home shortly after 6, I don’t get a chance to do much around the house until after Ingrid goes to sleep, which often happens as late as 8:30 or 9.

So I try take small steps in the right direction: half an hour here, half an hour there. It took 3 sessions to clean out all the dead branches from the lilac hedge. Every few days I spend 15 or 20 minutes exterminating cherry seedlings and the remains of sloppily cut-down cherry shoots. (They are all over the lawn – everywhere I go, I’m stepping on sharp stubs.) Every weekend we try to buy at least one of the things we’re missing: one day it’s a new saucepan, the next maybe some shelving.


I’m OK with these projects taking a long time, as long as there is progress, as long as every day makes things just slightly better.