Code and Chicken Wire

In 2015 my family and I fulfilled a longtime dream by moving to a big house in the woods in Eastern Tennessee. And as is customary for upper-middle-class white technocrat exurbanites, we decided it would be fun to do some lite “homesteading”. Including raising chickens for eggs.

Some eggs

Now to raise chickens you need a pen to (theoretically) keep the chickens in and the foxes out. And for a pen you need chicken wire, and to hold up the chicken wire you need fence posts. So I procured a pile of fence posts and a post-hole digger, and went to work.

A pile of dirt and digging tools

But I quickly encountered a problem. The topsoil of the foothill our house was built on consisted more of rocks than soil. After an hour of sweaty labor I had dug one (1) relatively shallow hole.

A hole in the ground

I decided I needed a better tool. So I went back to the hardware store and bought a fence-post driver: essentially a steel cylinder with one closed end and handles on the side. You slide the open end over your fencepost, lift it up, and hammer it down, over and over, until the fencepost is driven sufficiently deeply into the ground.

A fencepost driver

Or at least, that’s the theory. In this case the ground won, and the fenceposts lost.

A mangled fencepost

Once again, I needed better tools. So I went back to the hardware store and purchased a spud bar. This is basically just a six-foot steel rod, flattened on one end and sharpened into a hardened chisel on the other. You use your fence-post driver on the spud bar instead of on a flimsy fencepost, and it drives a hole just big enough to slide a fencepost into.

A spud bar

This, at last, worked like a charm. I was putting fenceposts into the ground in minutes instead of hours!

In fact I got a little over-eager, and didn’t think too hard about where I was putting my fence posts. When I stepped back to evaluate my work, I realized there were a few posts that needed to be moved.

A fence post in the ground

At this point I discovered a new problem: once this stony soil had bowed to the inevitability of accepting fenceposts, it did not want to give them back. I pulled and yanked and tugged with all my might, in vain.

Once again, I needed new tools. Back to the hardware store I went, this time in search of a fence-post puller. A fence-post puller is just a big steel lever on a base. You latch one end onto your fence post and lean all your weight on the other end, and out it pops.

This tool worked great! I had no trouble at all extracting the stubborn fenceposts from the ground. And along with my driver/spud-bar combo I was able to quickly reposition them in preparation for chicken wire.

A chicken-wire fence

All these tools are examples of leverage. They are methods of achieving maximal impact in the world, with the minimum expenditure of effort.

Which makes me think of code.

Why do we write code? The most common answer I hear is to solve problems. And that definition is fine as far as it goes.

But a lot of the work we do with software isn’t about puzzles to be solved. A lot of the code we write is there to effect some kind of change in the world. Particularly changes in how we work, play, or in how we connect and coordinate with each other.

This observation suggests a ruler that we can apply to code: how much leverage does it add? What is the effort that stakeholders expend to use it, and what level of impact on the world does that translate to? How would they have accomplished that same impact without the code?

What’s the leverage ratio of the code you’re working on today?

This article was adapted from part of my “#NOCODE” talk.

2 comments

  1. Hello Avdi. I enjoyed viewing your talk, after finding this page through an image search for chicken wire. One never knows how one’s words will find their way into the lives of others.

    I was a software developer in the telecommunications industry in the 80’s and early 90’s. I laid that hat aside and started sharing content through WordPress sites. I went on to develop several fairly complex sites using WP.

    I enjoyed the insightfulness of your talk, as it applies to system design at every level of our experience.

    In more recent years, I’ve turned my focus to creating universal systems that support our natural state of effortlessness. I applaud your return to square one and reconsidering the ramifications of our efforts.

    It’s been said that “least effort is most efficient.” I add that, zero effort is ultimate efficiency. Without considering all that typically goes unconsidered, there’s a monumental waste of effort. So, thank you for bringing to light, there may be an easier way. There always is.

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