There are a lot of similarities between snowboarding/skying and writing code using a version control system - Everytime you start writing files that aren't checked in you are going off-piste, most of the time you just go a little off piste to catch a jump or scoop around a cool set of trees, but occasionally you find yourself properly off-piste, in the middle of nowhere, really really far away from the main piste, files everywhere, it's dangerous, in the worste caes you delete files you needed by accident and all your tests stop working, and when it's really bad you are completely out of energy stuck in 3 feet of snow, you have to take off your board and walk back to normality - Occasionally it's unnavoidable because you haven't built the chair lift for this part of the software yet and so it's not possible to check in nice little chunks of changes, you got to just plough through the trees and deep snow until you get to where you got to get to, and deal with the added strain on your brain - When you do get to the other piste it's pretty cool though, you have some lunch and then it's back to regular coding again - Also snowboarding and skying is a lot more fun than programming, don't let silly analogies like this one make you think that sitting in a chair on front of a computer is in some way coolen.wikipedia.org #