This chapter was full of excellent tips and many hard truths. I would love to believe I work better by listening to music, but it is not the case. Recently, I have stopped listening to music while doing work and I get things done much faster. The writer of Clean Coder knows that it is usually distracting as well, and advises others not to multi task as it either leads to distraction or what he calls “entering the zone”. He makes the point that entering the zone is not a good thing because while you may get more done when you are extremely concentrated, you may make bad decisions that will later cause you to go over that code again to make changes. This is a valid point, but for me personally, I seem to always be in either one of two states: concentrated or distracted. If I am focusing on something, every thing else is a blur. If you talk to me in this state, I probably will not hear you. And if I stop and go do something else, it takes a bit for me to concentrate again.
Some of the other points he made was the distractions of worrying, interruptions, and writers block. These are all real life situations that get in the way of our thinking, and we need to find our own ways of combating these inhibitors. Worrying causes us to always be thinking of our situation than what we need to work on right now. Interruptions can cause us to snap at others for breaking our concentration. And writers block is the inevitable situation we find our selves in from time to time that stunts our productivity. His solution was pair programming, and while this is a good thing to keep in mind, we can’t always work with someone else. Sometimes we do not have access to another person for insights.
Lastly, he also goes through the debugging process in detail, explaining why debugging is so important. Debugging is not a waste of time or something that just has to be done, it is a part of programming and is just as costly as the program itself. Debugging is what tells you the quality of your code. Without it, you are basically taking a test without finding out how you did on it. Lastly, he mentions how time allotment and scheduling is important as well, and how bad pacing can cause late submissions. Being late is what we strive not to do, but when it does happen, we need to alert others as soon as we realize our blunder.
From the blog shatos by shatos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.