{"id":1143,"date":"2013-06-01T13:58:09","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T19:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=1143"},"modified":"2013-06-01T13:58:09","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T19:58:09","slug":"gardening-and-software-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1143","title":{"rendered":"Gardening and software development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the end of spring\/early summer in the northern hemisphere, so it&#8217;s time to plan the vegetable garden again. I was putting some tomatoes in the other day and musing about the similarities between gardening and software development. To wit:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I have a lot of hesitancy about planting&#8211;especially perennials.\u00a0 It feels so permanent, and I might screw things up, and maybe I should go back to the drawing board, or maybe just do it next weekend&#8230;.\u00a0 But just starting makes the problem so much easier&#8211;it loses its weight.\u00a0 Your garden will never be perfect, but an imperfect garden is 100% better than no garden.\u00a0 Similarly, when confronted with a new project or feature, half the battle is just starting.<\/li>\n<li>You will have ample opportunity to make mistakes in both gardening and software development, so feel free to learn from them.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know where I heard it, but &#8220;it&#8217;s fine to make mistakes, just try not to make the same ones.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Automate, automate, automate.\u00a0 The more you can rely on machinery to free you from the drudge of gardening, the more you can rest assured that you will have a great crop.\u00a0 Similarly, the more you can rely on automated testing and scripts, the more complex you can make systems, and the more freely you can change them.<\/li>\n<li>Trying something different is fun.\u00a0 I planted artichokes this year.\u00a0 I also played around with <a href=\"\/wordpress\/archives\/988\">easyrec<\/a>.\u00a0 I can&#8217;t speak for the artichokes yet, but exploring a new tool was interesting and fun.\u00a0 Look up from your code once and a while and visit <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/\">hackernews<\/a> (thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/jeffbeard.org\/\">Jeff Beard<\/a> for turning me on to that resource) to find something new to learn about.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think that many software developers are obsessed with passive income, but I think that gardening is the original passive income stream&#8211;food grown for you while you are doing something else!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s the end of spring\/early summer in the northern hemisphere, so it&#8217;s time to plan the vegetable garden again. I was putting some tomatoes in the other day and musing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1145,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1143\/revisions\/1145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}