Count to Ten

Here’s a trick that that has helped me as a programmer: before doing anything major, like killing a process, stop and count to ten.

I learned this in IT. When a screen froze, the IT professionals I worked with would stop and count to ten before taking action.

You’re watching a process run, it seems to have frozen, and you’re getting no instructions. Before killing it, stop and count to ten. If the process is still hanging after that, kill it if you must.

Computers don’t operate on human time, and our brains are ill-equipped to conceive of what they’re doing and when they’ll be done. Often they are about to finish or provide information, but our nervous wetware interrupts them and possibly makes things worse.

Give the computer a chance to finish or fail, and then intervene if you have to.

• Debugging