These days I am working intensely on a software project. When I get into this mode, I have a particular, and somewhat eccentric, way of working.<\/p>\n
Rather than use a software version control program (like a normal person would), every day I copy the entire software base, all the lines of code, into a new folder. So I end up with a trail of folders, each somewhat different from the last, and each named for the date I was working on it.<\/p>\n
This is not nearly as flexible as version control software. For example, if I get stuck, I can’t simply “roll back” to what I was doing an hour before. And yet I find it very satisfying. Recently I’ve started to understand why.<\/p>\n
A day is a very natural marker of progress. In the morning the Sun goes up, in the evening it goes down, and that day will never come again. For example, when you take a cross-country journey, you tend to think of the places you visited on any given day. In a sense, that city belongs<\/i> to that day. If one day you found yourself in some fascinating city, then that day becomes important in your memory.<\/p>\n
And I’ve come to realize that by giving each day its own little narrative, I am somehow putting the days into a kind of competition with each other. On Wednesday I added this cool feature. Then on Friday I fixed that nasty bug.<\/p>\n
I realize it’s not very logical, but it works. By asking each day to bring me something new or exciting, I think I’m getting a lot more done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These days I am working intensely on a software project. When I get into this mode, I have a particular, and somewhat eccentric, way of working. Rather than use a software version control program (like a normal person would), every day I copy the entire software base, all the lines of code, into a new … Continue reading “Software by the day”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14295"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14296,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14295\/revisions\/14296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}