Programming Warm Ups?

ResHippie asks: "No athlete or musician would think about just diving in to the day's activity without doing some series of warm ups first. Aside from starting most computing sessions with checking email and the like, I pretty much try to dive right in to the task at hand. It usually takes me a while to get going, though. Does anyone have any routines they go through before coding (or any other work-like activity) that helps?"

Comments

coffee

[Hubert_Shrump]

coffee, a little slashdot... poking at any outstanding errors, reading through error logs from the program in question... rereading the source, adding better comments to sections that you've forgotten /again/ how they work... write a little documentation, update the changelogs...

THEN the new code.

Advice for writers

[DrCode]

This is similar to some advice I heard for writers:

When you're being really productive towards the end of the day, stop before you're finished. Then you'll have something easy to start with at the beginning of the next day.

Kata

[darkpurpleblob]

Have a look at CodeKata, coding practice sessions. Doing one of these occasionally (start of each week?) may help you get into the right frame of mind/attitude.

little annoyances first

[pz]

To start a serious coding stretch, I take care of outstanding things that will be a distraction. Like, as many others have suggested, reading email, Slashdot, checking whatever web pages your mind might drift to, chatting with co-workers and boss, using the bathroom, eating lunch, etc. Then, make a cup of coffee, turn off telephone, select appropriate music, put on headphones, and start cranking.

If you can't leave your development tools in a specific state between coding sessions (ie, if you are required to or prefer to shut down compilers, editors, IDEs, and the like when not in use), then, as others have suggested, leave a syntactical error at a key location which will clue you in to where you were mentally (this is not so much warm up as a token to make the process faster next time around). Even if you don't shut your tools down, it's nice to have a quick description of what you were working on before to continue from. I often will write down a couple of key phrases on a piece of paper or yellow sticky (eg, "check interaction between reduncancy check and precomputation" or "examine compute_latency() output to be sure each event is valid") left on my keyboard.

Now, to really answer the question, I don't think anyone does any mental exercises to warm up. I also don't think they're necessary -- most of the posted answers, including mine, deal with preparing your environment for work, not yourself. The most common exception to this is ingesting caffeine -- and this is well-known to initially have a sharpening effect on cognitive ability. The most difficult part of doing hard coding is recovering the mental state, and while not exactly preparation for coding, it's the biggest step when resuming an earlier coding session, and many other posters have given good tips.