Why moving, writing code, and golf are similar

I apologize for the long absence in writing.  My family and I have been collecting and packing boxes to move in our spare time for the past few weeks.  I forgot how much work it is to move especially with little kids!  We moved into our townhouse in Marshall, Virginia this past weekend after moving out of our little 2 bedroom apartment which was located  on the 3rd floor - 39 stairs up!  After this move I promised myself to never again, no matter what will I live on the 3rd floor of any building!

Life has been good otherwise, I haven't been able to do much of the Epicodus coursework, work has been busy.  I am learning some of the Ractive.js library as well as the mustache.js library so my spare time has been filled with moving and doing some tutorials using Ractive.js.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have noticed some similarities between the process one takes when planning, packing, and finally moving into a new home and that of coding.

• Getting boxes from local stores can be painfully slow even when you call ahead and ask for them to be held for you I was immediately reminded of the process of setting up a dev environment.  No matter how easy it sounds there are always going to be a few unexpected snags.

• Packing up everything we owned took far longer then I had originally anticipated, even though we did a move like this 2 years before.  The difference was all of the kids toys and junk that we had collected or been given for them.  Developers I am told are always way too optimistic on estimating how long something will take to make, the same was true for my move.

• I remembered how steep and tough the 39 stairs were to climb 2 years ago when we moved into the 3rd story apartment, so I called all of my biggest, baddest, and strongest friends to help .  I promised them all an awesome lunch and drinks if they would give me a hand.  I estimated with every one's help that it would take no more then 1 hour to have the truck fully loaded.  2.5 hours later, on one of the hottest, most humid days of the year, everything was loaded into the truck.  Code is never the exact same and usually takes longer than what I think it will take in my mind.  I shouldn't ever try to rush it, same goes for moving.

• The new place has only 2 steps, I estimated 35 minutes to unload everything.  With every one's help the truck was completely empty after only 15 minutes!  This rarely happens in software when everything goes perfect, but when it does it blinds us, confuses our memories and makes us think that we can be more optimistic with our estimates next time... which leads us back to the original problem  :-)

• Moving, coding, and golf are very similar to me.  All of them hold perfectly still for you and just wait for the first move.  All 3 of them can be frustrating, but when you finally do get something right, hit the perfect shot of the day.  EVERY frustrating memory we ever had fade away.  It is a hopeless addiction, I can't say that I am any good at moving, golf, or writing code for that matter but I am enjoying the journey and the challenge to always learn, grow, and strive to do better next time!

Keep coding peeps!