Tagged “plants”

The first summer in the garden really only started once we got back from a holiday thanks to the timing. We'd been to couple of flower shows, picked up a few plants here and there, bought a bunch of cheap 'garden ready plug plant' offers, and then basically went away for two weeks and hoped that we didn't get too much sun in the meanwhile to kill them off. I'd made sure to water them in well over the weeks leading up to that, though, so I was reasonably relaxed about it.

Before I carry on with the building of the garden, I thought I'd write a little bit about deuteropathy, or what's commonly referred to as being colour blind. Deuteropathy is only one form of many colour perception issues, but they're all basically down to defects in the cones in the retina of the eye. These cones detect red, green, and blue light and it's essentially a genetic disorder that can't be cured. If you have the gene that means your cones don't work properly (or at all, in some cases) then you're stuck with it for life.

I was diagnosed quite young - eight or nine years old, as memory serves. I remember my mother being called into school after I'd done the test with the numbers hidden in the dots (it's called the Ishihara test) and she sat next to me as we did the test again. They hadn't bothered to tell me what was going on - all I knew was that I'd been pulled out of my lesson to be in an office with my mother and I thought I was in trouble for something.

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.