[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Thu Mar 22 04:01:46 AEST 2018


On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 01:56:38PM -0400, Nemo wrote:
> On 21 March 2018 at 13:28, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> wrote (in part):
> > I also apply what I call the Bus Principle.  If you get hit by a bus
> > and killed, one of your colleagues is going to have to take over your
> > work.  Give them a fighting chance with code comments, and maybe even
> > a design document for large or complex things.
> 
> A manager insisted that everyone spend the last 15min of the day
> writing down what was done that day on a sheet of paper and putting in
> your desk drawer.  No one was run over by a bus but the paper became
> the first thing many consulted next day (and the act of writing
> consolidated thoughts -- something much lost today).

I'd like a $repo/src/STATE file filled out at the end of my day.  Back in
the day I had a coworker that would do a 

	find /home/bk/lm -maxdepth 3 -name STATE -mtime -1

in the morning to see what I had been up to :)

The act of dumping what I was trying to do, what I had figured out so far,
just dumping state, frequently lead to the solution.  So it had the "bad"
effect of making me work longer to actually finish.

I've worked on problems in the kernel that were hard enough that it could
take me as much as 8 hours of thinking to get back to where I was yesterday.
The STATE file came out of that, it ramped me up faster.

--lm



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