Chris Holmes Online

Ayende made me laugh again:

I should qualify that with saying that I am also a lazy person by nature, therefor I would tend to learn just enough to get myself out of problem.

I believe all good developers have a lazy gene in them. Not the slacker gene, mind you. There is a difference. The slacker gene causes developers to do all sorts of bad things, like cut-and-paste code, or skip unit testing because “it’s just faster to write the code.”

But the lazy gene is the catalyst for good programming; it brings about solutions to repeating problems. The lazy gene is the one that prodded someone to write the quicksort, or develop an O/RM because writing data access code is repetitive and boring. The lazy gene prods developers to write tools to become more efficient because repetitive coding injures the brain like repetitive motion causes injuries. The lazy gene causes a developer to say, “Hey, this code exists in three places, I’m going to extract it into its own class and refactor.”

Developers who possess the lazy gene feel pain when they experience code that is repetitive, cumbersome, or hard to use. That pain prods them to refactor their code into something more useful and maintainable; it prods them to build a better solution, or tool, or whatever, so that not only do they not feel the pain anymore, but so that they can ease the suffering of other developers as well. Fellow developers then feel the burden lifted from their shoulders thanks to the work-product of a lazy gene developer. Their lives become easier because they can sit in front of their computer plugging away at Visual Studio with ReSharper installed…

Final (almost unrelated) thought from the RSI wiki:

A repetitive strain injury (RSI), also called repetitive stress injury or cumulative trauma, is any of a loose group of conditions from overuse of the computer, guitar, knife or similar motion or tool.

I’m a developer and a guitar player. I also do the vast majority of cooking in my house… I feel so doomed…