Tagged “beginnings”

We didn't really expect to find a house quite as soon as we did. When one showed up in our price range around the corner from my dad's house and my daughters' school, we obviously went and had a look at it. When it ticked the boxes of what we were looking for, we put in an offer. When it was accepted, we suddenly had a lot of planning to do.

We got the keys in October, and we obviously focused on the inside to get ourselves settled. The garden had obviously been left for a while with only the minimum upkeep on it, so the lawn wasn't in great condition and things were a little overgrown. However, we had absolutely no idea at all what was in the garden. I figured the sensible thing to do was to wait for a little while and try to identify what was in there as far as we could before we started making any changes.

I'm almost always at my most dangerous when I have a desire to do something but no clue what I'm doing. However, I've always been fond of research - probably a callback to my degree in Physics, or a misspent youth and subsequent career working with computers. Do the research up front, and things tend to become easier. It's pretty much key to my maxim of being long term lazy. If you don't know that one, it's the idea that you have to be lazy in the long term, not in the short term. It's vitally important to being a good code monkey - do the work up front so that you have do less work in the future. Being lazy in the here and now always means that you'll have more work to do in the future, so a little bit more effort up front will always lead to less effort in the long term. It's also about doing the right work up front, and doing that work exactly once.

See, the thing about gardening is that it's not a short term thing. There's an old saying that you should live like you're going to die tomorrow, but garden like you're going to live forever. I think that applies to code as well, in the sense that you've got no idea when you'll need to come back to old code to fix it or modify it. If it's a disorganised mess, then you'll have to deal with that later. Worse, you'll have forgotten all about what you were doing when you wrote it. If you want to make your life easier then you have to write it in such a way that it's easy to come back to. To do that right you need to plan ahead and be thinking for the long term.

I've never liked being out in the garden that I can recall. Maybe when I was very young and we had a dog to play with and swings and slides, or booting a football against a wall or something. But, in general, playing outside meant that hay fever kicked my ass on a regular basis. If you've never had the joy of that, let me tell you that it's no fun at all.

At the basic level, it's mild headaches, runny noses, and sneezing. If it gets worse, then it'll hit your eyes - itchy, streaming eyes at first but then they go all puffy and sore and red and you can't see any more. Yeah, they gave me a bunch of drugs to manage them (beconase inhalers, triludan - stuff that was later deemed unsafe for use in children just to add a little extra to things) but there's only so much they can do before they basically give up. The eye drops were the thing I remember detesting the most - stinging little dollops of pain, but at least it meant I could see again for a while.