As I began to teach my graduate class this evening, I remarked that it had been a very long day, and that I had only managed to get through it without complete burn-out because I had taken time to do some programming.<\/p>\n
Many of the students laughed, so I thought it would be useful to explain. So many things in the course of your day are beyond your control, I said, including incoming emails, looming deadlines, and other people’s behavior at meetings, to mention just a few.<\/p>\n
But when you program, that’s just between you and yourself. It’s a world that you yourself create, and that you can steer into any direction you want.<\/p>\n
One of the students objected on very reasonable grounds. “What about bugs you can’t catch?” he asked.<\/p>\n
I explained that I’m talking about programming you do to help you relax. Nothing outrageously complex, no giant code base or tricky mathematical algorithm that you don’t completely understand.<\/p>\n
Rather, I relax by picking a programming task that is manageable, something challenging enough to be interesting, but easily doable within an afternoon. Comfort coding, if you will.<\/p>\n
Once the students understood what I was talking about, they agreed. Everyone does it within their own domain. The chef who makes a simple dish to relax, the songwriter who tosses off a little ditty between sets, we all have our own version of comfort coding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I began to teach my graduate class this evening, I remarked that it had been a very long day, and that I had only managed to get through it without complete burn-out because I had taken time to do some programming. Many of the students laughed, so I thought it would be useful to … Continue reading “Comfort coding”<\/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":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19195,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19194\/revisions\/19195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}