Tagged “design”

The first couple of months had really about taking the garden by the scruff of its neck and starting to tidy things up. By this point, I'd been making notes and thinking about things for the best part of two years and by this point I had a whole bunch of completely impractical ideas and a garden that was nowhere near that at all.

Obviously, I needed to have some way to turn those ideas into something that could be practically done, and something that I could actually start working on. In the back of my mind, I also had the idea that I didn't want to do anything in terms of ripping things out of the garden or even doing any more than generally tidying up the flower beds until we'd had enough time to see what the garden did. At the very least, I figured a year to watch the garden change and work out what was in there wouldn't be a bad idea before I started ripping stuff out.

Well, maybe not everything needed to wait an entire year.

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.

It's probably not a stretch to wonder why someone who hates gardening and being in a garden at all even bothers to have a garden. I mean, surely it'd be easier just to remove all of the plants and have a giant patio or concrete it over or something like that, right? I wouldn't have to get beaten up by the nasty pollen any more, and there'd be plenty of space for a table and chairs and a barbecue. Surely that's job done?

Well, I kinda had a garden like that in the first house I bought. It was flagged and had a raised rectangular brick-built goldfish pond and that was it. Aside from removing weeds from the cracks between the paving there was very little to do, and no upkeep. Perfect, right?