I'm trying to be good these days and eat a healthier diet. But doing it "the hard way" is just as difficult as going cold turkey. So I've been trying to find ways that actually make it easy to eat a healthy diet.
One way I'm doing this is through Riverford farm[1] - they deliver a box of fresh fruit and veg to your door once a week (or once a fortnight) for the same price (and much better quality) that you get in the supermarket.
I find that cooking then becomes a surprise instead of a drag. It makes eating your vegies a little bit fun. "What am I going to cook today? Lets see, what do we have here in box number 1?" :)
Something as simple as this helps with inspiration - which is often the only kick-start you really need. But I don't underestimate the "it's delivered to your door" aspect... No fuss, no muss. It really helps make it easy to be good.
On a similar vein, I also get myself graze.com[2] boxes twice a week. They send out a box full of delicious nibbles, randomly chosen from items that you've already rated as something that you've liked. It's novel, it's fun, it's generally pretty healthy. It's enough to eat for lunch and much better than the local greasy-spoon. ...but I don't do it every day, so I don't feel like I'm starving myself or denying myself all of life's pleasures. They also taste delicious. So it doesn't feel like I'm doing any stringent dieting.
Again - just making it easy to do yourself a little good.
How does this apply to programming?
Well, there are heaps of things we *ought* to be doing. Testing, code reviews, refactoring... But somehow it often seems like this stuff just never gets done.
In these cases, it really helps to make it easy to be good.
In my case, I've picked a language and framework where testing is assumed to be done as the default case. It's really easy to do proper testing in Rails. More than that - you're looked-at funny if you don't... like you're actually doing it wrong. So tests, in Rails, tend o get written more often than in other languages (where you often have a hard time justifying to people why you've got to write them).
Once you have tests in place, it's really easy to refactor - because you can do it, knowing that you have a comprehensive test suite to catch you if you break something - gives you the confidence to get it done.
and code reviews? well - if you've been regularly refactoring, then you won't be as ashamed to show off your code to other developers... because it won't be a horrible, hard-to-grok mess... and that makes it much less likely that the code reviews will be put off due to it being "too hard"
Each little step makes it easier and easier to be "good", which makes it far more likely to actually *happen*.
Notes:
[1] Riverford farm only deliver to the UK - but I strongly recommend them - I've been eating their small fruit+veg box once a fortnight (which is enough for just me), and they're always fresh and yummy.
[2]graze.com The graze link is an affiliate link - it will give you a free box so you can try it out yourself. Normally they're around £2.99 each. They ask for a CC to register - but it's easy enough to cancel.
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