A simple two-word phrase: solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking.
It’s a Latin phrase, and when I think of it I picture a Roman engineer deciding to inspect an aqueduct or bridge. It is solved by walking – the only way to figure something out is to get in front of it and actually take a look.
When I was working for a corporation, though, the phrase held a different meaning for me. It is solved by walking – if you have a question or problem, the best solution is to walk over to the right person – say, the SME or department head – and ask them to their face. A quick face-to-face at someone’s cubicle was always the best way to get an answer or a problem resolved. And if they couldn’t help you, chances were that someone else in the vicinity had the answer you needed.
The corporate version of this is of course MBWA “management by walking (or wandering) around.” That may sound like micromanaging but for a while it was a real thing, based on the Japanese quality management theory of the genba walk – management walking the factory floor to understand a problem where it occurs.
But now we are all in the cloud, we work remotely. You can’t get in front of the right person to get an answer. And there’s never just one problem, either. That Roman engineer probably had to deal with some dependencies on which a decision hinged, but not the mass of details we face every day. Even the cubicle dweller or department head I spoke to usually only needed to make a decision on one database or one application. Now we use applications like Slack to ping ideas back and forth, we create and share our dashboards and reports. There is a faster time to question, but sometimes that adds additional complexity instead of returning a quick answer.
Walking still helps. When I worked from home as a programmer, I was always surprised by how constructive it was to take a regular walking break. I took at least two of them every day to accommodate my office mate, an Italian greyhound with a tiny bladder. I solved countless problems on those walks – things that seemed complicated and difficult revealed themselves to be simple and solvable in the space of a quarter hour.
This doesn’t seem strange to me at all. It’s very likely a programmer’s brain is running a number of threads concurrently, and a walk gives some of them time to complete. But there’s also some interesting science behind this too. A 2015 study found that “participants who went on a 90-min walk through a natural environment reported lower levels of rumination.” In the study, rumination is technically defined as “repetitive thought focused on negative aspects of the self” but for programmers that might manifest as things like imposter syndrome or a sense of hopelessness when dealing with a challenging coding problem.
Some of the science behind this theory is outlined in this NY Times article: “…rumination also is strongly associated with increased activity in a portion of the brain known as the subgenual prefrontal cortex.” Brain scans of study participants displayed less blood flow to the region, and questionnaires confirmed improved mental health scores, after a walk in nature.
What was interesting in the study was that walking seemed to help only when it took place in a natural environment, like the leafy suburban streets I strolled with my greyhound. A busy city street was not helpful – most likely because of the many distractions, although there could also be a chemical basis – studies show that compounds released by trees called phytoncides helped significantly to reduce systolic blood pressure. Again, the Japanese have a term for it: Shinrin-yoku or forest bathing.
Programmers usually worry about eye strain – some of us use Redshift (not that Redshift, the other one). But these studies suggest to improve the quality of your workday (and your code) you might be better off taking a walk, or at least sniffing a cedar-derived phytoncide. This site even has a Latin phrase for that: Terra viriditatem sudat. The earth exudes freshness.
Two takeaways: First, if you’re not getting up and walking around, you may be doing your brain a disservice. And second, you never know when you’re going to get some use out of your high school Latin.
