Douglas Adams, the brilliant author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The idea is that you take your towel everywhere you go, as — according to The Guide — “a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have”.

Douglas, who indisputably died too soon, had the idea for the book while lying drunk in a field on a camping-site: “The idea for the title first cropped up, while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gössers after not having eaten for two days straight.”

So me and some co-hackers thought it would be a good idea (and a great tribute) to go to Innsbruck on that day and try to find the exact location. Alas, it turns out that the camping-site doesn’t exist anymore — it has been replaced by a nursing home. Here are the exact coordinates, in case you want to go there as well:

47°16'33.79" N
11°25'24.61" E

On the train from Munich to Innsbruck I reread a couple of chapters from Douglas’ last book, “Salmon of Doubt”; one of the chapters is a transcript of a fascinating talk he gave in 1998, which is entitled “Is there an artificial god?” (transcript)(mp3).

The reason why I like this talk so much is that Douglas succinctly explains the origins and purposes of religions as well as how technology and scientific progress — he differentiates between “four ages of sand” — shaped our view of the world and religions. Very inspiring words… a must read (hear) for any carbon-based, ape-descendant, bipedal life form.

I recently wrote about the most important tools of a software developer. The tools that I mentioned are important to be a successful developer — they are not sufficient to master the other challenges of life.

Being the geek that I am, I carry all sorts of things in my pockets — things I couldn’t live without. Today, I’ll do a headstand and show you what I’ve got.

First of all, there is my swiss army knife. I need it for all kinds of situations: tightening screws, cutting of loose threads on clothing, opening bottles. Last spring we went on a hiking trip and my son got bitten by a tick — I used my knife’s tweezers to pull it out. It’s amazing: once you carry a swiss army knife, all kinds of occasions arise to use it and you wonder how you could have survived so far without it.

But I had to make a trade-off: naturally, I wish to have as many functions on my knife as possible: many screwdrivers of different shapes and sizes, a magnifier, scissors; and it should have a big blade such that its possible to cut off a slice of bread from a big loaf. All of this is available from Victorinox and Wenger (they even have knives that come with LED lights and USB memory). Alas, there is only limited space in my pockets! I certainly don’t want to carry a brick around. After years of experimenting with various models, for me, the Wenger “Evolution 10” is the best compromise. Always remember: the best knife is the one that you have on you; a 30+ function knife is of no use if it’s left in your cupboard.

I also need to have a pen on me. Not just an ordinary five cent plastic giveaway pen that might leak ink or run dry. Typically, those pens are also too big to carry them in your pants pockets (I rarely wear shirts, so all my tools need to be placed in my pants pockets). I prefer the famous Fisher ‘Bullet’ Space Pen. This pen is just so cool, so small, so sleek, so robust, so timeless. It comes with a special pressurized ink cartridge that allows you to even write up-side-down — on wet paper, if necessary.

Speaking of paper: a pen — even a Fisher Space Pen — is of little use without paper (unless you are willing to write on your palm or the back of your hand, something I do only in extreme situations). I’m a big fan of Moleskine notebooks and I would love to have one available everywhere I am. Unfortunately, even the small version is too big and heavy to carry in a shirt or pants pocket. By contrast, my ’emergency notebook’ is quite lightweight: a folded A6 index card, which gives me four pages of about 10 cm x 7.5 cm. It’s not much — but it is something!

Whether there is something to fix or an idea to be jotted down, with my tools I can rise to the occasion; I wouldn’t even think about leaving my house without them.

It simply had to happen again: an unfortunate coworker responded to a department Christmas party invitation, but instead of selecting “Reply” he accidentally chose “Reply to All”. Now 200 people not only know that he will join but also what particular meal he prefers.

Not a big deal, you think?

Years ago, I was on a team facing schedule problems. Our team lead sent an email to our sales manager trying to explain the technical difficulties that we were facing; the whole development and sales team was on the “CC” list. One of the developers replied to the team lead, indicating that a person like our sales manager would never understand our technical problems.

Well, he didn’t use the exact same words that I just used; in fact, he used quite different, actually, rather — ahem — colorful words to express his feelings about the technical abilities of our sales manager. And — you guessed it — he inadvertently clicked on “Reply to All”.

In my view, the one who really is to blame when something happens like this is the company that develops such bad user interfaces. Actually, I don’t know a single mail client that has some level of protection against such embarrassing scenarios.

Here is my solution: When the user selects “Reply To All” change the color of the background to red (or make a beep or some other noticeable change to the look and feel); most importantly, replace the text of the “Send” button with “Send to All”.

What are the most important tools of a software developer? In my view, the keyboard, a programmer’s editor and a scripting language are the top candidates. Compared to fancy design tools they might look mundane – but only at first sight: combined and mastered, they have the potential for making a developer an order of magnitude more efficient.

KEYBOARD

Let’s face it: as a software developer, you spend most of your time writing. Not just code but also test scripts, documentation and email. Hence, the keyboard is your most important basic tool, just like the saw is the most important basic tool of a carpenter.

It is a sad fact that many programmers don’t master touch typing and instead use the “Hunt and Peck” approach: they awkwardly enter text through slow and error-prone two-fingered typing.

The main problem with two-fingered typing is that since it is so cumbersome and slow, developers tend to avoid writing: they won’t write the Perl prototype of an application that would be so useful for the next trade fair and they certainly won’t write comprehensive documentation. Today, a large part of the communication in software projects happens through email, especially if the team is distributed over the globe – what a pity if you cannot type efficiently!

If you cannot touch-type as a programmer, you simply have to learn it. Now.

Fortunately, it’s rather easy. Within a couple of weeks you can achieve marvelous results by just practicing 20 minutes a day. There are countless programs for self-study out there, many of which are free, like KDE’s KTouch. Just do a search on your favorite search engine for “touch typing”. There are even games, like typespeed that you can use to improve your typing skills. Try it out, it’s great fun! However, it is important that you finish a systematic course first; that is, you know the positions of the basic keys blindfolded.

Once you are sufficiently proficient with the basic keys, you should tackle the remaining special keys as well, since they are quite important for software developers: punctuation marks, the ‘at’ sign, braces and brackets. Don’t stop until you know your keyboard inside out. If you catch yourself peeking at the keyboard too often, consider buying a keyboard with blank keys, like DAS Keyboard: a piano player doesn’t need letters on her keyboard and neither do you.

PROGRAMMER’S EDITOR

For years I had used various editors and IDEs for my daily work: for Java development, I used Eclipse, for C++ development Visual Studio, for batch file and test development as well as log file viewing and editing UltraEdit and TextPad; I used Outlook and Lotus Notes for composing emails and usually Microsoft Word for any other kind of documentation. Even though I read the Pragmatic Programmer’s advise “Use a single editor well”, I didn’t know how to live by it – until a colleague gave me a nice tour of the VIM editor about three years ago.

Ever since that day, my developer life has changed profoundly. Now, I use VIM for at least 90% of my writings. I even use it for composing emails, provided I expect my email to be longer than three lines of text. It’s just sooo cool! Now more do I use IDEs for building my projects; instead, I build from withing VIM by invoking a command-line build script; VIM’s “quickfix” feature lets me easily navigate between compiler warnings and errors. For me, the only legitimate use of an IDE is when doing source-level debugging; for changing the code and compiling I switch back to VIM.

I’m not trying to convince you to to learn VIM, since it is a large investment. It took me a couple of month to get some proficiency and even after three years, I’m still learning. But what a worthwhile investment it is for me!

Whatever editor you chose as your single editor, make sure you know it inside-out. Always ask “is there a smarter, more efficient way to accomplish what I want?” and check with the documentation. For instance, you should know how to program it, know how to create abbreviations and shortcuts, know how to record macros. Find out how to run external tools (like executing makefiles or checking out code from version control). Most importantly, learn all the hotkeys and key combinations for tasks that occur frequently, like deleting the word under the cursor (in VIM type ‘daw’) or indent the current paragraph (in VIM type ‘>ip’).

A programmer’s editor corresponds to a carpenter’s workbench: It serves as an integration platform for all your work.

SCRIPTING LANGUAGE

Even a craftsman sometimes needs power-tools to save time and get mundane and repetitive jobs done; so does the programmer and that’s where scripting languages excel.

By scripting languages I mean dynamic languages like Perl, Python or Ruby that don’t use static type checking like traditional languages such as C and Java do. Scripting languages are highly expressive and have constructs that let you achieve miracles in just a few lines of code. As an example, this Perl code

executes “my_prog.exe”, captures its output and counts the total number of error messages. If you are like me and think that this is still too long, here is the one-line version:

Try this in a traditional programming language of your choice and compare the total number of characters typed – expect that it will be 10 to 20 times as as many.

Most of the time, you will use scripting languages for automation and text processing; however, you can also use it to sketch and smear in order to develop prototypes that you might later recode in a traditional programming language.

A mastered scripting language is a great time-saver: It enables you to write lots of little utilities that make your and your colleagues life easier.

CONCLUSION

The combined power of touch-typing, a programmer’s editor and a scripting language makes a software developer much more productive in two respects: first, it ensures that jobs get done in little time and second, it encourages programmers to try out ideas. The latter is the basis for long-term developer motivation and outstanding performance.

I recently read a funny story by Douglas Adams called “Cookies“.

Here is a summary.

Douglas arrives early for a train, and buys a cup of coffee, a newspaper and a packet of cookies. He takes a seat at a table, opposite of a businessman. After a while, the guy leans forward grabs the packet of cookies, tears it open and eats one. In his story, Douglas explains how he – as an Englishman – is not at all able to cope with this situation, so he just takes a cookie himself. A minute later, the guy takes another cookie and so does Adams. This procedure repeats until the packet is empty. Finally, the guy leaves – they both exchange “meaningful looks”. When the train arrives, Adams gets up, takes his newspaper and discovers underneath it – his packet of cookies! Douglas ends the story by saying that “The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.”

A very funny story, indeed…

After my giggling had settled, I couldn’t stop pondering about it. Doesn’t this seemingly improbable story happen all the time, only slightly differently? How often do we think somebody is plain wrong or is unfair to us, when in fact it is exactly the other way around? How often do engineers, salespeople and managers talk at cross purposes? Isn’t this a terrible good example of a paradigm shift, a total change in one’s perspective?

Douglas picked up the newspaper, which triggered the paradigm shift. If he hadn’t picked up the newspaper, he would have walked around for the rest of his life believing that the other guy was pretty weird. So what is the lesson to be learned? Whenever we think we are treated badly or others are plain wrong, we should try hard to find the newspaper — and pick it up.