Developing Software in a Sauna
and revising old posts with AI
There are cynics amongst us (if you are reading this, you should know that by now) who say that the most pleasurable part of a sauna is getting out of it and being relieved from the heat.
Developing software is like that, sometimes. You will always run across a bug in your software, or poor documentation, or an upgrade or language shift where all the things you expect to be there aren't. So you bang your head against the wall until a solution falls out of it (hopefully out of your head... though the wall has contributed on occasion). And then you stop banging your head and give it a final slap as you solve the problem. Then it feels good. So good, you wind up banging your head again in a few months/days/hours over another problem.
Of course, just like in the sauna, there’s always that one person who claims to love the heat—the developer who insists they thrive on chaos, who grins at a stack trace like it’s a Sudoku puzzle. Don’t trust them. They’re probably the same people who say they enjoy cold showers and anchovies on pizza. For the rest of us, the cycle is familiar: you dive into the code, confident and optimistic, only to find yourself sweating bullets as you try to decipher what “SyntaxError: Unexpected Token” actually means this time.
Eventually, after spilling enough sweat and coffee onto your keyboard to be justify the $10 spent on a silicone keyboard cover, you emerge victorious. The bug is fixed, the unit tests pass, your CD pipeline deploys to staging, and you feel a rush of euphoria that’s almost worth the ordeal. You promise yourself you’ll document everything this time, or maybe even write better tests next time. But let’s be honest, you’ll be back in the sauna soon enough—sweating, swearing, and secretly loving the moment when you finally get to step out into the cool air of a solved problem.
©2025 Scott S. Nelson
Originally published at https://theitsolutionist.com/2009/09/08/developing-software-in-a-sauna/