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The Healthy Programmer

I sit at a desk all day. I sit with my hands on a keyboard or mouse and my eyes fixed on a computer screen. This is a terrible thing to do to one’s body. I learned this first hand when, just over two years ago, I developed wrist and back pain so severe I nearly chose a different career. Instead, I talked to a doctor, read up on ergonomics and repetitive stress injuries, and made some significant changes to how I work.

I wish this book had existed back then, and better yet that I had read the book before the pain started. Even though I am healthy and doing well, I find that I must be vigilant. I get up and walk for a few minutes every hour. I take longer walks at least twice a day. I look away from the monitor frequently. Still, when I’m in the groove, it is easy to look up and realize that I have not changed my position for 3 hours. Those moments are far less frequent, and must be infrequent if I want to be able to do this sort of work the rest of my life. Same goes for you, and the sooner you realize it and adjust your work habits for the sake of your health, the better.

The Healthy Programmer: Get Fit, Feel Better, and Keep Coding is a book I recommend highly to all who work behind a desk all day, but it is especially written for programmers. While I spend more time writing documentation nowadays, my thinking patterns and my physical habits fall into the same category. This book spoke clearly to me and I think it will to anyone in a similar position.

The Healthy Programmer suggests a method of implementing changes to daily work and diet patterns that will be familiar to programmers. It is iterative, measured, and all-around Agile. You start by taking stock of where you want to go, what you want to see happen. Then, you measure how things are today and make small changes, one at a time, to your life and see how each affects the things you measured. As you get the hang of one thing and choose to incorporate it into your regular lifestyle, you measure something else and repeat the process.

We start with an introductory chapter. These lay the foundation for why some habits are good while others are not. Most of the facts are already known to us. Face it, programmer/computer engineer types are a pretty bright bunch. However, we don’t always choose to apply our knowledge, primarily because of how we have adapted ourselves to the pressures of the job. Once you get past the no-scare-tactic-or-hype discussion of habits and the well-cited using academic journals research behind what the book promotes, you find yourself wanting to do the things it discusses. It is kind of like that time you heard about a new toolkit available in a programming language you love that lets you implement a feature you have been dying to play with. You can’t wait to get started.

Topics covered in the book include walking, sitting vs standing, diet and nutrition, headaches and eye strain, back pain, wrist pain, exercise, getting up and out of your cube or home office, understanding fitness, and more. Everything comes with citations and balanced, scientific discussion that never gives in to hype or fad. You get advice that is backed up by doctors, scientists, nutritionists, and fitness professionals…and none of it sounds like the stuff you hear in the diet craze of the month or year. There are no vague promises, no unrealistic expectations, no fearmongering nor scare tactics. Just good information that is well presented and molded into a style of communication and plan for implementation that will be familiar to programmers.

This is a 200+ page book that can be easily skimmed over a weekend. Then, you can go back through it slowly over a period of months and let it help you be or become healthy and prevent, reduce, or eliminate pain. It is worth it.

Disclosure: I was given my copy of this book by the publisher as a review copy. See also: Are All Book Reviews Positive?