It is four in the afternoon.
The bug is close.
You have been reading
the same stack trace
for forty minutes.
Your eyes feel gritty.
The lines start to swim
a little
when you look away and back.
You put it down to tiredness.
It is more specific than that.
Two things have been happening
since lunch.
The first is blinking.
A blink spreads a thin film
of tears across the eye.
When you concentrate on a screen,
you blink far less often,
and many of the blinks you do make
never fully close.
Studies of screen work
keep finding the same thing.
The film dries out
between blinks.
That is the grit.
The second is focusing.
To see something close,
a small muscle inside the eye
contracts
and changes the shape of the lens.
Looking far away
lets it relax.
A screen sixty centimetres away
asks that muscle
to hold the same effort
for hours,
with nothing to break it.
That is the swimming.
Neither of these
is damage.
But both cost you
the thing you were trying to protect.
Gritty eyes pull your attention
to your eyes.
A tired focusing muscle
makes reading slower
and mistakes easier.
You are fighting your own equipment
and calling it a hard bug.
The fix is small
and well known.
The American Academy of Ophthalmology
suggests the twenty twenty twenty rule.
Every twenty minutes,
look at something twenty feet away
for twenty seconds.
Out of the window.
Down the length of the room.
Blink slowly,
on purpose,
a few times while you do it.
Twenty seconds
is not a break.
You do not lose the problem.
You can hold the stack trace in your head
while your eyes are on a roof
across the road.
Tie it to something
you already do.
Every test run.
Every build.
Every time the page reloads.
Put the screen a little lower
than your eyes
and an arm's length away.
The bug will still be there.
Your eyes will be ready for it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)