I like programming. When I don’t get to program for a while, I feel a certain restlessness. It’s the same with reading books, and physical exercise: when I get too little of it, I feel it.

Most of the time my work fills that need. When I get home and Ingrid’s gone to bed, I’d rather blog, read a book, etc. My hobby programming projects languish untouched. I haven’t done any work on my Rails app for over a month.

But this week I have barely touched a line of code at work. Instead I’ve been installing a new build-cum-version control-cum-database server, migrating all of those things from the old server to the new one, plus getting our new developer up to speed, doing various administrative tasks, and handling customer support issues.

By Thursday I was definitely feeling the pangs of abstinence, and my Rails app finally got some attention again. Luckily it’s a small app so it isn’t too hard to pick it up again. The hard part is remembering whether I had some unfinished task lying around, or whether I can just start on the next interesting-looking piece. I’ve taken to checking in a “next step.txt” in order to keep track of where I was.