It's a well-known adage that "The hardest part of any job is starting". This is the real reason people organize their workbenches, so that they don't have to spend effort looking for the stuff to start a new job. In my favorite Tolkien short story "Leaf by Niggle", our hero learns to put down his tools and materials so he can easily pick them up again and continue work. As software developers we hate going from task to task because of the cost of "context switching": that picking up and putting down that takes so much time and effort. Is there a way we can make restarting a software development job more frictionless? How can we put down a development task so that it's easy to restart it? One part is the IDE, that can take us back to what we were working on. But just being plopped down in a forest doesn't remind us where we were going or why. How can we quickly regain the context of our work? Should the IDE replay the last handful of edits to remind us what we'd done? Or would it be better for us to narrate to ourselves what we're doing? Could the IDE record our voice and replay it along with the edits? The makers of serial television series have done this for years. "Previously on XYZ Adventures..." where we see critical scenes from the past couple of episodes. This sets the stage for tonight's installment. Could an IDE synchronize our narration and previous edits to help get us up to speed quickly when we take up our work anew?
