Get Comfortable
In Your Physical Environment, Tools, and Teams
At one point in my early army service, I was assigned to a recon team. In one of the drills, we reached our designated spot and I started setting up the reconnaissance equipment.
A couple of minutes after I started, one of the older guys came out and said, “What are you doing?” I answered that I’m setting up, and he said, No, no, no! Do you think you’ll be able to stay in this uncomfortable position for the next twenty four hours and be effective?” I broke down what I built and did it again — this time in a much more comfortable way.
That lesson stayed with me: You need to be comfortable in order to be productive. And it’s not just me; there’s a lot of research showing the comfort has positive effect on productivity.
Today, I am no longer in active duty. I spend most of my time writing, mostly code, but also the occasional blog post or even a book.
Which brings us to the question: What does it mean to be comfortable as a software developer?
My answer is that you need to get comfortable in several places.
The first place is the physical one — you need a good place to work. Consider everything from the chair you sit on, to the keyboard, lighting, noise level, and more. Can you sit in your working place for a couple of hours without getting too tired or distracted? If the answer is “no,” find out what’s causes the issue and fix it.
Think about a time you went to help a fellow developer and had to use their keyboard and IDE. It wasn’t fun, right? The second place is your computer.
I’ve worked with Vim for more than twenty five years now. The dual mode editing and the editing commands (such as dd to delete a line) are burned into my fingers. In every new IDE (such as VSCode) I try, the first thing I install is the Vim plugin. Maybe you prefer the workman keyboard layout — then going back to QUERTY will be a pain. Apart from keyboard and IDE, there are all the shell aliases, custom scripts, and commands that you have gotten used to.
I have most of my setup in a git repository, which makes it pretty easy to setup a new computer.
The last place to get comfortable is in the team you work with. Do you feel comfortable expressing your opinions? Even to your manager and higher ups? Are people pleasant and inclusive in the chat room? Is the development process smooth? Maybe there’s too much bureaucracy?
If your workplace is not comfortable, try fixing it. If you can’t, maybe it’s time to move on to a better place.
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence.
— Samuel Johnson
Comfort also comes with skill. One of my hobbies is bouldering. In order to be comfortable at my current level, I had to exercise a lot. Most of these exercises were at a level that was pretty uncomfortable for me at the time. The same goes for software development, if you want to be comfortable tackling the hardest tasks — you need to keep learning and practicing.
So get comfortable, challenge yourself, and keep hacking!
Check out Joe Kutner’s book, The Healthy Programmer, for more practices you can implement for your comfort and health.
Miki Tebeka has four books with The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
