{"id":682,"date":"2008-07-25T23:19:29","date_gmt":"2008-07-25T21:19:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=682"},"modified":"2008-07-26T21:34:28","modified_gmt":"2008-07-26T19:34:28","slug":"small_steps_in_the_right_direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2008\/07\/25\/small_steps_in_the_right_direction\/","title":{"rendered":"Small steps in the right direction"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\nIt may seem a million miles away<br \/>\nBut it gets a little closer everyday\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\n1.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe code base I work with is large, amorphous, and ugly. By now I&rsquo;ve cleaned out the obvious junk (unused variables and methods, commented-out code, files that weren&rsquo;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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nUgly code makes me feel uncomfortable, anxious, tense. It&rsquo;s like an itch, or an unpleasant noise. I have clean it up because I couldn&rsquo;t stand the knowledge that I&rsquo;d have to look at this every day for months, or years.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nCleaning 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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n2.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe 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&rsquo;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.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo 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 &ndash; everywhere I go, I&rsquo;m stepping on sharp stubs.) Every weekend we try to buy at least one of the things we&rsquo;re missing: one day it&rsquo;s a new saucepan, the next maybe some shelving.\n<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>\nI&rsquo;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&rsquo;ve cleaned out the obvious junk (unused variables and methods, commented-out code, files that weren&rsquo;t used). But the rest is still in a bad state. There are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everything_else"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}