My approach is usually to stare out the window or at a wall or blankly at my desktop and “see” the code, in a sense. Almost as if projected onto the world - but not quite. I think I’m seeing packets of meaning rather than programming language text. It’s hard to say for certain. I can move those around and make adjustments and sort of “push” sub-designs to the side, connect them up later, etc. and it all feels very visual. A design will often come to “look” good before I even start typing anything related to it.
Occasionally this doesn’t seem to work. I think it’s when the problem isn’t well defined enough to know quite where to start or if the problem involves doing a lot of stuff I haven’t done before. In those situations I usually have to wait out the process and “watch” code trying to come together in my head until some part of me determines that I simply don’t have enough information to continue. When that happens, I sit down and just start typing code out so that it gets out of my head and into the program. Once enough of that is done, even if it’s crap, that seems to clear up the mental clutter and I can go back to my usual approach and refactor later once I know what that original code was really for or where it goes (if anywhere).
This happens without my wanting it to happen, sometimes. I might be driving and suddenly get a flash of something that’s wrong in the code or a way to fix a bug I noticed hours or days ago. I’ve found memory leaks while driving and nowhere near a computer, for example. It can be a problem when trying to go to sleep at night, too, and I found the best way to deal with it is just get up, fix the code, and go back to bed. Trying to stay in bed and ignore it simply leads to insomnia.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Life, Programming, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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