Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard

Does this scenario sound familiar? Ever wonder why it happens? The trick is that while you’re coding, the logical part of your brain is active and the creative side is shut out. It can’t present anything to you until the logical side takes a break.

Here’s a real-life example: I was cleaning up some legacy code and ran into an ‘interesting’ method. It was designed to verify that a string contained a valid time using the format hhss xx, where hh represents the hour, mm represents minutes, ss represents seconds, and xx is either AM or PM.

The method used the following code to convert two characters (representing the hour) into a number, and verify it was within the proper range:

If none of this series of comparisons failed, returning false, the method returned true.

If the preceding code seems wordy and difficult to follow, don’t worry. I thought so too — which meant I’d found something worth cleaning up. I refactored it and wrote a few unit tests, just to make sure it still worked.

When I finished, I felt pleased with the results. The new version was easy to read, half the size, and more accurate because the original code tested only the upper boundary for the hours, minutes, and seconds.

The point of this story is not that I eventually replaced over thirty lines of code with just one. The point is that until I got away from the computer, I thought my first attempt was the best solution to the problem.

So the next time you hit a nasty problem, do yourself a favor. Once you really understand the problem go do something involving the creative side of your brain — sketch out the problem, listen to some music, or just take a walk outside. Sometimes the best thing you can do to solve a problem is to put the mouse down and step away from the keyboard.

By BurkHufnagel