Coding matters: Eat your way to knowledge

No, you can’t eat your way to knowledge. Unless, of course, your job is to identify flavours blindfolded. Then you’ll need to eat to educate your taste buds.

I had planned to write about the idea of (code) spring cleaning. But then the topic of food came up.

Training and food (again)

Incus Data is registered on the Central Supplier Database. This means we receive RFQs from government departments. These are usually RFQs for items like safety boots and office chairs. I don’t know why procurement staff don’t read the supplier info on the system.

Last week we actually received an RFQ for training. Here’s what bugged me. The RFQ used three times (3x) more words to describe the food they wanted on course, than to describe the training they need.

Before I prepare a quote, I always ask what programming background the delegates. It’s an important question. It’s taken a week to get a one-line answer to that question. I bet that if I sent a clarification question about types of drinks required, I’d get more detail.

It wasn’t a helpful answer. Apparently national security prevents them from saying what languages they have coded in. Even though the RFQ suggests what languages they are going to be coding in. Government intelligence at work?

I know some of you miss the food we provided during in-person courses. I’ve written about this before in What about the food. But I still can’t accept that food is a criteria for chosing your training provider.

Programming and food

Many movie scenes about programming are ridiculous. The amazing displays, fast downloads, and even faster ability to hack anything. So it’s also silly to believe that all programmers live on cold pizza, cold coffee and energy drinks.

According to the Quora AI bot, programmers probably consume more junk food than healthy food. It gives 4 reasons for this:

• Long hours mean that junk food is more convenient.
• Stress and burnout can lead to eating comfort food.
• The sedentary lifestyle contributes to poor dietary choices.
• Junk food is more available in tech environments.

Who knows if that is true? It can apply to anyone who works long hours at a desk job and has to prepare their own meals.

I was surprised that I couldn’t find a Pixabay image of a person eating at a computer. I had to use an AI image creator to generate the image for the blog.

Anti-programming food?

I found a very old and slightly silly blog post about programming food.

It described programming food as food that needs only a single appendage to eat. Renier would actually agree with that. If you can eat your food with one hand, you have a hand free to type or move the mouse.

Anti-programming foods, on the other hand, are foods that ‘slosh’. They increase the risk that you will need to find a way to dry your keyboard. (Some of us are old enough to remember the days when you were not allowed to have drinks or food near a computer.)

I’d love to hear about your thoughts about training, programming and food.