Metrics

I'm overweight.

That means: 210 Lbs, 5'11". Lots of driving, airplanes, lots of coffee, lots of typing (coding, testing, writing), and raising kids will do that to you.

Yes, I coach soccer, which is an hour of light exercise a few times a month in-season.

I suppose I could look at someone else more overweight and say "hey, I'm not that bad off."

I could make a New Year's commitment to exercise and eat better; but I gave that one up this year in May for STAREast and never made it back.

The problems? First, Over-eating isn't *visible* to me - or to anyone else - except in a gradual form that is hard to notice. I don't have much energy and my clothes don't fit ... but I haven't had much energy in awhile, and I can always buy larger clothes. So I am trapped in an addiction cycle; I feel bad, so I eat, and feel better for a short while, but worse in the long term. So, the next day, I feel bad, so ...

Second, exercise is not convenient. Especially in the winter.

Now, If I could just make diet and exercise something that was visible to my friends, family and colleagues - something I could bask in glory for success, and something they could hound and decry me for failure. Then I might have a chance to break this addiction cycle. I think the key is to make it public.

So, here are a few things I'm going to do:

1) I purchased an elliptical trainer, so "It's too cold" is not a good excuse.

2) I created an account on Traineo.com.

Traineo is a metric manic's dream website.

You enter your weight as often as you check it, and it creates pretty graphs.

You enter your amount of exercise, and it creates pretty graphs - even calculating the calories you burned based on the type of exercise, time you spend, and intensity.

You can create a goal, and it will show how far you are from that goal, and how much time you have remaining.

And you can create custom metrics. Here's my site.

Here's my basic strategy:

If I work out three to four times a week on the elliptical, that should be enough to maintain, but not lose, weight.

So I want to do something else to lose the weight. How about give up Mountain Dew during the work week? A 20 Oz, twice a day, five days a week, that's 200 Oz less Mountain Dew.

I also often eat junk for breakfast. So I created a score for my breakfast eating; 0 is Cheerios or fruit; 5 is super sized McDonalds.


What this has to do with software development

I've been using traineo for four days now. Just four days into the system, I found that I was eating candy bars and other snacks.

That doesn't show up in the metrics!

So the metrics have some value, but are imperfect. Once you realize how to game them, it's pretty easy to abuse them and remove the value, if not make them downright misleading and harmful.

Does that sound familiar?

Over the holidays, I may not have time to blog, but I'll try to keep the traineo site up. I believe there will be additional insights into software that we can mine from it.

And, if you'd like to encourage me, please feel free to check out the site and see how I'm doin'. There is even a role called a traineo "motivator" where traineo emails you my stats weekly. If we've actually met in real life, and you're interested in being a motivator, let me know.

--heusser
PS - If you can't see the tie-in between technical debt, metrics, and weight yet - don't worry, it's coming ...