Clean your work area!
Clean your work area!
When in the kitchen, how are you behaving to old dishes? Do you make space in order to have space to cook the food? After finished cooking the food, do you leave dirty dishes to the next day?
I’ve worked in a couple school kitchen. When I worked, it would be in the form:
- make sure that there are nothing cluttering the kitchen that shouldn’t be there
- make sure that the kitchen is clean
- prepare food and put food and milk in place for the children
- do dishes
- clean up the kitchen
I’ve worked a few months in a mechanical workshop. My boss told me how to work:
- make sure that the area where you are going to work is uncluttered and clean
- work
- make sure to put back all the tools
- put any unused materials back to storage
- clean up the work area
My grandfather (engineer and architect) told me how to behave in his workshop:
- clean up the table, make sure you have space to work
- work
- clean up the table
In his mind, if you go for lunch, then work is considered finished (so you need to clean up before going to lunch).
In software development it’s not unusual to try to ignore the cleaning part of the job. Why is this considered OK? Will the job be easier if you have to slog through:
- commented out code
- comments that are unmaintained
- debug code
- dead code
- uncommunicative function names
and the list goes on.
Why do you avoid to follow even the boy scout rule of leaving it a little better than you found it? Perhaps it’s because you have no sense of code smell? Perhaps it’s because you’re stressed? You’re a junior developer?
The thing about code is that once you have a clean working area (clean part of the code base where you are working), is that changes and additions will become easier to implement. Fewer things to keep in mind will keep your working memory focused.
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