The bike and the laptop

Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez
Netherlands eScience Center
3 min readMar 16, 2023

Reflections on machines that help you

Photo by Cale Weaver on Unsplash

Students pay attention (sometimes)

I was 17, my face was covered in acne and my hair was (awkwardly) long. I was sitting in a high school lecture room. For some reason, I still remember the topic of the day: the efficiency of different transportation means. There was this figure in our natural sciences book comparing several of them. Something along the lines of how much energy per kilometer and person was consumed by a plane, a car, a train, …

Unsurprisingly, airplanes and cars were marked as less efficient than a bus or a train. The figure seemed pretty obvious and boring, but there was something that surprised me to the point I still remember it today: a bike was more efficient than… walking!

A decade later, I came across an old pal from my high school years. Our paths diverged at university: he chose a career in computer science, and I did in physics. As often happens, we ended up talking about the (arguably) good-old teenage years. To my surprise, he mentioned the bicycle figure from that day’s lecture. He told me that it was that figure that convinced him to study computer science. I was puzzled… what? how?!

His reasoning was the following: “I immediately made the link to computers. If a bike can improve your legs' efficiency, a computer can improve your brain’s”. Sounds a bit far-fetched… but I cannot disagree. Furthermore, 20 years and many lines of code later I want to stretch this analogy even further.

Laptops and bikes. A far-fetched analogy

Let’s start with two obvious statements:

  • A bike can help you move faster and more efficiently than you would achieve walking or running.
  • A laptop (or any computer) can perform calculations and manage information in ways your brain cannot.

But as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker: “with great power comes great responsibility”. I mean… superpowers come with their own dangers and disadvantages. For instance:

  • A bike can increase your chances of getting involved in an accident, or, less dramatically, hurt your knees if you don’t properly adjust the saddle.
  • A laptop can flood your brain with distractions and multitasking to the point of paralyzing your workflow. Less dramatically, you can use it in a way so inefficient that it just doesn’t scale, turning your tasks into a painful experience.

There is another obvious, yet subtler similarity: both a bike and a laptop require learning how to use them. I remember very well how I learned to ride my bike as a kid: by driving in circles inside a parking lot with my dad running by my side. I was terrified, and he needed a lot of patience, but eventually, it worked out.

Ironically, I don’t have such a clear and well-defined memory of how I learned to program and efficiently use my personal computer. Not my dad, nor anyone, seems to have been my mentor. I had to learn by myself. Too often, I had these “Eureka” moments… shortly followed by a “how in the world has nobody told me about this before?”.

My “Eureka” moments

If my computer had been a bike, those “Eureka” moments felt like discovering I had been riding it backward for years. Let me share some of them:

  • Setting up an environment that works for you, that helps you keep focused and minimizes the time searching for information, maps to adapting the bike saddle to your length.
  • Learning how to debug is like learning how to fix a punctured tire or a loose chain.
  • Starting using version control is like installing a GPS holder on your bike. Now you know where you come from, and also where are you going!
  • Getting started with unit tests is like learning, sometimes the hard way, that it is a good idea to wear a helmet if you are race-biking.
  • Incorporating multiple best practices together, such as unit tests, linting, etc… is like discovering that your bike has different gears and you don’t need to suffer that much every time you want to climb a slope.

I know. Laptops and bikes. A bit of an odd analogy but… what did you expect? After all, this is a Dutch Software center.

PS: are you interested in experiencing some of those “Eureka” moments? Take a look at our free training materials and courses.

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