Eh, close enough?

So some of you may know that I have started going to the gym and back to martial arts. Martial arts is my favorite thing to do. If I had enough money, I would quit my job and travel the planet and train Martial arts. First stop would be Fairtex Thailand learning Muay Thai from the best. But we will save pretend time for another post. Since I love martial arts, I thought a kickboxing class would be a good way to get an hour at the gym in and not dread all 60 minutes. I was wrong.

That 60 minutes was the most painful kickboxing class I've ever done, no literally it hurt. As I write this my knees are still in pain. I have never had knee pain from martial arts ever and I've been doing this for 15 years. So was the class hard? No. Did we hit each other? No. Did the instructor say, "Fuck form and let's go for speed!' You better believe it. This was the single biggest mistake I could have made taking this class. I knew I should have walked out when She was demonstrating the moves. There were a few flags right off the bat.

1. A jab, cross, uppercut, and a hook do not look the same at all. Yet she was showing everybody the same "jab" as all four punches. YouTube them if you have never seen them.

2. A proper kick generally goes above the knees. Especially a front kick, that shit is not to be aimed at somebody's shins.

3. Bouncing always is fine to stay moving. But trying to get everybody to kick one direction while jumping back the other way is a recipe for disaster. Hell, doing any jump kicks in tennis shoes are a horrible idea. In real life Jean Claude Van Dam would have busted his god damned ankle the first time He did some spin kick while jumping in running shoes.

4. Also this instructor is having us squat on our toes and you are doing it wrong if your heels are on the ground. Nearly fell over when I heard that.

I can only imagine how many people walked out of that class thinking that they actually did something other than put an expiration date on their knees with a date still in the teens. Now how does this relate to technology?

Form is key in everything we do. If you try to slam something out just for speed sake, you can expect that there will be pain when you are through. If you don't take the time to learn the proper way to do something, you can't expect your doing it right to begin with. I can't count the times that I have had to watch hotfix 5 go out on a project only to have to pretend to be shocked that another is going to be needed. That is pain that nobody needed. The project I inherited had great forms, and yes I mean that to be plural. It was piece parted from examples found all over the internet. So the pieces were pretty good, just not the whole. The problem is that nobody stepped forward to say, 'Hey, stop!'

When writing code, deploying code, or standing up environments. Have some standards, or proper form. Save yourself countless hours or even days of pain. Doing things fast is cool, doing them right is even better. It isn't a badge of honor that you can do something in 5 minutes, if you have to do it 10 times to get it right. Or even worse, you get it done in 5 minutes and shut down and don't even check your form. This is how an application blows out its knees.

So please, check your ego at the door. Start with a lower weight before you take on the heavy shit. And lastly, for everybody's sake, get a fucking spotter to help you. It is easier to have someone help you carry something when it gets too heavy, than to pull it up off your throat once you drop it.