Remembering my Grandmother's Roto-Edger
Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:55 PM
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My neighbors think I'm crazy because I use an ancient tool to edge our lawn where it meets our driveway and sidewalk. It's a manual edger called a "Roto-Edger" that's hard to use in our thick, tangled Bermuda grass. It works great, but it's a very manual process that's a lot harder to use than a gas or electric edger. It's a weirdly sentimental tool for me - it's the only "thing" owned by my paternal grandmother I've ever seen. (She passed away years before I was born, but I'd like to think that her hard-working spirit has been passed down.)
At work, as we move more and more into using tools that automate our development lives (ORMs in particular), I have to remind myself constantly to think in terms of the Roto-Edger from time to time. This morning I was working with a bunch of the transactional and TDD support classes in Spring for Hibernate and TestNG (respectively), and realized I getting to the point where things were so automated I had lost track of what was happening at a lower level, and it was this loss of perspective that was causing a problem that took me a little while to figure out (specifically transactional conflicts between AbstractTransactionalTestNGSpringContextTests and annotations-based transaction demarcation in a DAO). When I set aside all the automation and remembered what each piece of the puzzle was doing, the problem became very clear, and resolved itself quickly. Even though all the cool tools definitely speed up my development life, the problem never would've existed if I was working manually.
Moral of the story: I need to remember what all the tools are doing under the hood, and even though I'm not doing the work manually, it can help to think manually.
jfish wrote on 07/28/08 2:10 PM
Our elderly neighbors have just moved into the assisted living / frequent hospitalization phase of life, and their neices have accepted the help of my wife and me in cleaning and moving stuff, particularly heavy basement and garage things. They have offered any of the stuff to us that we feel like taking; they don't need it and they don't want to haul it from Cincinnati to Chicago (they don't live nearby). One of the items my wife decided to bring home last week was exactly one of those edgers you have pictured!It is indeed, hot, heavy work to push it, but there's something satisfying about feeling the work, knowing that you're sweating with good reason.