Oddities of energy and code

This afternoon I wasn’t concentrating very well while coding. I did the job but I felt slow, tired and not very engaged.

I don’t like working while I’m in that state, mainly because I can’t produce good quality code and my head spins too much. I decided to take my iPad out and catch up a bit on some articles I had stacked up on Instapaper. I did read a few articles but I kept feeling tired and slow, wasn’t able to really absorb what I was reading.

I went downstairs, hanged around a bit with my sister and then fired up Catan HD on the iPad. I found a nice position to place my settlements so I could gain good resources to win the game but my luck was horrible! It seemed like every single turn the two computer players were able to steal my resources, leaving me with nothing to play with. I failed miserably…

I didn’t give up though. Even though I had lost I knew I could beat them so I started the same level and played using with the exact same strategy. I knew I had a good strategy and that the reason I had lost was because of bad luck. So there I go placing my settlements, roads and boats… and as I had suspected, my strategy worked and I beat the crap out of ‘em!

After playing those games I felt awake again, my mind was flowing, my energy was growing so I decided to get back to coding. I had mostly finished what I had done earlier but I had to write some tests to prove the fact that I had mistakes and that I could do better. So I fire up my tests and red flags start shouting at me making me notice how stupid I had been earlier. I cleaned up my mess, refactored a bit, found a better place to trigger the code I introduced and then fired up the tests again. This time Xcode went silent… it just looked at me with approval and told me: Test Succeeded.