One thing I have noticed recently is that I like to avoid branching. Now what I am talking about here is not branching at a code level. I am talking about mental branching as I am writing code, following other trains of thought or investigating problems whose answers are not immediately necessary.

It seems obvious, but after following along some conversations on twitter recently I think I need to post more, even for things I find obvious. So…

About a meter from my desk I have a whiteboard.

The sections and structure of it don’t really matter, they are what makes sense for my project and the team I am working with.

Almost every note on that board is a branch I could have gone down that would have caused me to stop what I was in the middle of doing and focus on the branch. I find this sort of context switching very disruptive.

To be clear about the whiteboard this isn’t some sort of quasi-agile project workflow (we use trello for that), these are not story cards and if someone calls me up and says “we have some important thing you need to do” then I branch. This is not about sitting in a programming utopia where I am uninterruptable, it is about not interrupting myself. These notes are questions and tasks that need to be answered or completed but ones that can wait. Here are some examples

• “Should we avoid making searches we know to be bad?”
• ”Should we write a $0 tax record or leave the tax record off?”

The domain I am working in at the moment involves talking to a lot third party APIs and integrating them into the internal domain model. So inevitably there is a lot of mapping that goes between the response from the API and the internal model, both are quite complex and different from each other.

So while I am sitting down with a list of 50 properties I need to go though and I come across one where I do not know the business answer to the problem, I write it on a note, stick the note on the board and move on. Then once I am done, I go to the board and read through through the notes.

Sometimes with the extra knowledge I have gained since writing the note I can now answer it myself. Sometimes I can ask someone else on the team and they answer it. Sometimes I can research within the codebase for the answer. Sometimes I need to talk to the product owner.

That is a lot of “sometimes” and it is precisely why I defer that chain of “sometimes” until the last possible moment.