Web Development and the Art of Home Improvement

The recent acquisition of a circa-1920 Colonial fixer-upper in Portsmouth means that I've been spending my days learning the ropes here at iMarc, and my nights taking a crash course in home improvement.

As my girlfriend and I are often not working within earshot of each other, I'm spending a lot of time alone with my thoughts. As I reflect upon the day, I've been noticing a number of parallels — good practices that seem to apply to both activities.

Before You Do Anything, Do Your Research and Have a Plan

This seems like it should be obvious, but it's amazing how many times early on in my career I would just "dig in" without coming up with a fully articulated plan beforehand. Often this meant putting the cart before the horse, which translated to wasted time and effort retooling code to accommodate unforeseen changes. If the steps were performed in the correct order, all of that could have been avoided.

Getting burned by this one too many times will eventually change an inexperienced developer's habits, so imagine my surprise when I found myself falling into the same trap on the house — wouldn't it have made more sense to fix the ceiling corners with joint compound BEFORE painting the ceiling? Now I'll need to retouch all those areas.

Keep Your Work Area Clean

I've noticed over the years that the number of files on my desktop is inversely proportional to the general clarity of my thinking. Having to dig through unorganized piles of crap derails your thought process. Keeping documents arranged in folders and using a consistent naming convention can make it easy to find things and avoid the dreaded context switch.

Similarly, cleaning as you go (whether it be painting, skim-coating, or demoing a wall with a Sawzall) will make it easier to see what's going on in front of you, and therefore reduce the likelihood of making mistakes. Putting tools back where they belong makes it easier to find them when they're really needed.

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Done

Developers are, by their very nature, detail-oriented people. But this can sometimes work against us when we become hyperfocused on a minor detail at the expense of overall project quality. It's important to keep things in perspective — does moving the login box two pixels to the right matter when there are overall issues with error handling and robustness? It's up to us as developers to prioritize appropriately.

To me, this represents the most obvious parallel — as we're moving in at the end of the month, time a limited resource for us, and I want to spend it in the most efficient way. It would be nice if the trim in the living room were absolutely perfect, but there's still the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom, and bedrooms. There may very well be time later to go back and tighten up — and if we can, we will. If not, we'll get to that in the next pass.

Know When it's Time to Call it Quits

We've all been there at one time or another at the end of the day: post-afternoon coffee, low blood sugar kicking in, but you still have a ton of stuff on your plate so you forge ahead anyway. The next morning when you review your work, you ask yourself "What was I thinking?"

Maybe you didn't have time to review it the next morning — that code was committed, and caused a bunch of headaches for your fellow developers. Maybe it would have been better to review your comments, catch up on email, or review the bug database than work on that critical section of code.

The other night I was pulling up nails out of a hardwood floor. Because I was tired, hungry and impatient, instead of waiting till I went to the hardware store and got the correct tool for the job, I tried to make due with what I had, and ended up making a bunch of unsightly marks in the floor.

Where the Analogy Breaks Down

I did, however, encounter one situation where my right-brained thinking worked against me.

Last Thursday I went down to the basement and noticed a bunch of water on the floor from the load of laundry that had been started earlier that afternoon. Since we'd done several previous loads without drainage problems, and the size of the load seemed a little on the large side, I guessed that the problem was with the washer.

My first thought was "I need to reproduce the problem." So for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to start another load of laundry and see if I could make it happen again (I didn't think far enough ahead to consider what I was actually going to do if I were able to make it leak water again).

Of course, as the washer was filling, I rooted around and found the real source of the problem — a backed up drainage pipe. Now I was stuck with a washer full of wet clothes I couldn't finish, lest I flood the basement floor with even more water.