When Columbus reached the New World, he burned his ships. As a result his men were well-motivated.
This quote comes from the character of Marko Ramius, as played by Sean Connery, from one of my all-time favorite films, "The Hunt for Red October". I love that quote in particular because I always think of it whenever I decide to tweak my process, my work environment or my tools. For all but the most trivial changes, you usually have to immerse yourself in it. So I usually "burn my ships" by leaving behind the old way of doing things to really burn the new way into my brain.
Sometimes the new way turns out to not be so great. That's fine because that's a satisfactory result of the experiment. If the "new way" turns out to suck, there's just as much to learn (if not more) from a real crash-and-burn than success.
The first big "ship-burning" I did was very early in my career. I had been a few months into my professional developer career doing Java and decided that I really liked this Unix thing. So I completely wiped out my Windows NT work box and put one of the first versions of Red Hat on there. I figured if I was going to get good at Linux I was going to have to just jump in the deep end of the pool and learn to swim.
It turned out to be an absolutely wonderful decision. Throughout the years I moved through several distributions: Red Hat to Mandrake to Gentoo to Ubuntu. Each new distribution taught me something more about Linux than I knew before (especially true for Gentoo).
I've done the same trick with editors too. When I first started out I used vi for my Java development. I tried using the first IDEs (JBuilder, etc.) but they were all terrible. Plus, at that time a serious Java IDE for Linux was still a twinkle in Erich Gamma's eye. I had a co-worker who was an XEmacs power-user and it looked like he got a lot done so I figured I'd give it a go—especially since I had on-site technical support. This was my first experience with Emacs and I never really got beyond basic editing. I wrote a couple of macros but that was about it.
Then NetBeans rolled around and I was more than happy to start using it. I had a decent intellisense feature and built-in Ant integration, both of which were a significant step forward to me. I ran with that for a couple of years until I started a new job where everyone was using this new-fangled thing called Eclipse. I tried to hold-out with NetBeans for a while, but after watching some others pull off some seriously cool tricks in Eclipse I knew it was time to give it a go. I've ridden that Eclipse horse for damn-near six years and I'd be willing to put my knowledge of Eclipse-editing arcana up against anyone.
Several years laster, on the operating system front, another big change was coming. I had been a die-hard Linux fan since my switch back in the Old Days, but by winter of 2005 I had run into a tangled knot of Linux-related headaches that really sapped the fun out of it for me. Between home servers and 64-bit laptop (in 2005!) I spent more time just trying to keep my machines up to date and running than actually getting anything productive done. However, it wasn't until I went to my first Seattle Ruby Brigade meeting (when everyone there had a Mac) that I seriously considered switching operating systems.
This was the same time that I discovered Ruby. What attracted me to the language was not only the beauty of the syntax, but the underlying philosophies of pragmatism, simplicity and no-bullshit attitude. There seemed to be a similar attitude in Mac users and I found this approach appealing. This is not a knock on Linux. I love Linux, I just don't want to use it for my desktop OS anymore. I don't have the patience to fiddle with things that much anymore. I have lots of ideas and I'll never get anywhere if I get bogged-down with irrelevant minutiae and yak-shaving.
When I switched to the Mac I got myself a license for TextMate which has definitely been the editor-of-choice for lots of Rubyists. However, as I blogged about before, it's now time to get off the TM-train and switch (back) to Emacs.
So what's the point of all of this? Am I just thrashing? Am I desperately throwing myself at each and every new tool on the block? You might think so, but I actually have some discriminating taste. I do try out a lot of tools because I'm always looking for some kind of edge, anything that I can leverage to get stupid busy-work out of the way. As I get older I have less and less patience for this sort of thing for productivity taxes. I just want to get something important done.
So, from time to time, a little alarm goes off inside my brain to remind me that it's time for a change. Sometimes it's something as simple as changing my terminal or editing font. Other times it's things like learning a new language. Regardless, all of these things keep me from getting mentally lazy. Once I get mentally complacent, it's game over. So consider if perhaps it's time to "burn some ships" just keep things interesting.
Good heavens, some day I may even do something as crazy as switch to a Dvorak keyboard layout. That just might make my head explore—in a good way.