From Raymond Chen’s non-tech entry today:
I knew a guy once who claimed that you didn’t really own anything that you couldn’t carry at a dead run while firing an AK-47 over your shoulder.
For some reason this made me laugh out loud. It reminds me of the never-ending battle I have with my wife over stuff we should keep. I’m apparently significantly closer to Raymond Chen’s acquaintance on the spectrum of ownership philosophy.
Every time I find myself cleaning the house, this line from Fight Club leaps to mind:
The stuff you own ends up owning you.
Now I’m not prepared to make any insightful comments on our consumeristic society, but I do believe that you actually have to spend time on maintenance and organization of the “stuff” that you have. And you have to make a decision how much of your life you want to spend on maintenance and organization of your stuff. I sometimes joke that I was not aware, when I married my wife, that I was also committing to a lifetime storage contract for a large number of rubbermaid boxes full of mysterious, but apparently important, “stuff.”
If you “have” something, but you don’t know where it is or whether it works, do you really have it? I think not. My wife’s opinion differs. (In her defense, there is also a significant portion of the basement dedicated to old computer parts. I think there are at least 4 14-inch CRT monitors down there. But hey, they all work.)
My desire for a well-organized basement is in lock-step with my desire to have clean, well-organized code. The stuff in your basement is like a seldom-used API: if nobody’s sure where it is or how it works, and there’s no documentation, it’s virtually worthless. A basement full of mislabeled (or unlabeled) boxes is like an undocumented library written by an ex-employee 7 years ago: almost useless and taking up valuable space. Obviously code doesn’t take up space in the same way rubbermaid storage containers do, but the concepts of code cruft and basement clutter are closely related in my mind. It we’re going to keep it, let’s keep it in a state that’s useful in some way. And when we add new stuff, let’s make sure that’s also organized in such a way that we truly have it. Too much code, too poorly organized, can end up “owning you” in a very real sense.
So yes, honey. I’ll refrain from throwing out the Bed Bath and Beyond coupons we got in the mail. I’ll put them in the ever-burgeoning “to be thrown away in six months” pile.
