Show Me Your Desktop

Last week, @shanselman started a tag stream on twitter called #showmeyourdesktop.  He seemed to be somewhat miffed that everyone he knew had nice, clean desktops with a pretty background image and very few icons.  About 10 submissions in, I decided to post my own work desktop, which you can see in a prior post.

This is apparently not how must programmer desktops look.  At all, period, ever.  From the photostream, it would appear that programmers put a high emphasis on an empty desktop and pretty background pictures, either nature or architecture.  I personally never ran a desktop background until Vista, and that was the default because I was too lazy to change it.  (The WinXP one immediately got axed after changing the theme to ‘Classic Windows’.)  The same goes with Windows 7, which I run at home.  I simply don’t understand why everyone has pretty high-resolution, memory intensive images for their background.

It is my firm belief that if you see your desktop, you’re doing it wrong.  And by ‘it’, I mean your basic task workflow.  Now a large number of programmers who posted images might never see their desktop; they just Win+Ded it down for the sake of the chat.  Why is everything so clean?

My desktop is cluttered with mostly temporary objects.  My typical workflow:

  1. QA files a bug.  I get an email.
  2. I read the bug through Quality Center (a horrid piece of shit program, btw)
  3. I notice it’s with our Excel Import functionality.  They provide a file.
  4. I download the file to the quickest place I can access:  my desktop.
  5. I start our application, hit import, and navigate to the easiest place to find:  my desktop.
  6. I import the file.  It fails.  Crap.
  7. I fix the bug.
  8. I notice their test case doesn’t cover a few other  boundary conditions that I just introduced.  I open the excel file by Win+D and grabbing the latest file, which in is in the far bottom right.
  9. I make the changes.
  10. Start our app again to reimport.  Open -> Desktop -> Select file.
  11. Hooray!  Everything is fixed.  I go back into QC to log my new test cases, sing the ActiveX to attach the file.  Easiest place to get to?  My Desktop.

Repeat for a few dozen bugs, and you get a lot of crap on your desktop.  And it doesn’t bother me.  They’re all throw-away files that are logged in other systems.  The code changes are made are logged in source-safe and the test-case is logged in quality center.  The mess that is my desktop never goes into any of these systems; it’s simply just a temporary storage heap.

Why would I use my desktop for anything else?  It’s simply part of a tool (a computer/OS) that I use to do my job.  I do believe in taking pride in ones toolset (sharpening the saw, so to speak), but this seems to be a bit like the glowing see-through PC cases everyone grew out of after freshmen year.  You’re cool and all, but I’m going to be more impressed with what you do with your tools then what they look like.