My new home office is nearly set up! I haven’t had my own room to work in since I was a student and the memories that it’s bringing back have got me thinking about how I think. My personality and passions are becoming externalised again: in Legos, pretty rocks, collectible figures and other knick-knacks put out on shelves and also in my ideas themselves, scribbled in the many notebooks I bought and then mostly forgot about, until now. (I must get a whiteboard again, too.)
As well as making a space my own, I’m also much more monotropic in my thinking when I work alone, behind a closed door and with no expectation of sharing. If you haven’t heard that term before, monotropism is a relatively new idea in autism research, theorised for the first time in the 1990s when I was growing up. It describes “a tendency for a person’s attention to concentrate deeply on a small number of interests at a time, rather than distributing attention across many things (a mode called ‘polytropism’)” (The National Autistic Society, online, 2025). I was first diagnosed with autism 4 years ago, having masked as neurotypical for most of my life – especially, I realise now, when I had the space to work in a focused way for periods of time.
The writer Virginia Woolf was so right when she argued in her famous 1929 short-book-length-essay A Room of One’s Own that a woman must have “a room to herself” if she is to be a writer. Woolf, a pioneering modernist author, meant writing fiction rather than code, but I think she’d have been sympathetic to women coders too. I first read A Room of One’s Own when doing my MA in English and it set me on a path towards the academic career I eventually had for more than a decade, before I turned to coding. Woolf’s book has stuck in my mind ever since.
The essay makes powerful political statements arguing for women’s education and autonomy, but I’ve always been stunned by what an unusual piece of writing it is too, hovering between harsh reality and imagination, real women’s struggles and fictional ones designed to highlight how women have been mostly left off the historical record entirely. For example, Woolf invents a fictional sister for William Shakespeare, a talented writer herself who died in obscurity, unlike him, because she wasn’t a man. It’s an intricately crafted, dreamy and persuasive essay that taught me a lot about useful ways to think and write: deliberately, slowly, critically, making strategic use of imagination and, above all, craft.
Clearly, then, when I started coding, I thought of it as learning a new language to be used and crafted as deliberately as any other. I soon saw the book Clean Code recommended (thank you, random Reddit user from years ago!) and bought it as compulsively as I buy many other books. As a huge how-to book about tech, I didn’t expect it to be so readable, so well-crafted, funny and thoughtful. I felt a lot like I had reading Virginia Woolf as a student, drawn every time into a monotropic few hours of learning about my topic – code, these days – but also about craft and effort themselves. (A few days ago, during a job interview, the interviewer reminded me of this book and how wonderful it is – one of the seeds of this post!)
I mean, look at this: “The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that. This is not an assertion that I can justify. I can’t provide any references to research that shows that very small functions are better. What I can tell you is that for nearly four decades I have written functions of all different sizes. I’ve written several nasty 3,000-line abominations. I’ve written scads of functions in the 100 to 300 line range. And I’ve written functions that were 20 to 30 lines long. What this experience has taught me, through long trial and error, is that functions should be very small.” (p. 107)
What an elegant, succinct little story not just about how to code (and it is fabulous advice) but also about effort and craft: learning by doing, making mistakes, doing again and gaining knowledge for the future. Reading Clean Code made me feel like the student I was, again, in a good way. Its engaging, funny and humbling pages made me painfully aware of how much I didn’t know yet, but how much I would, if I stayed the course, so to speak – a lot like A Room of One’s Own had made me feel years ago, as a nervous but happy new postgraduate student of literature.
A few weeks after picking up Clean Code for the first time, I was committed to an intensive 13-week Northcoders bootcamp in Data Engineering, but also to a whole period of my life I would spend in a new set of disciplines but with familiar habits as well: claiming space to work and making the effort to it takes to master code as a craft like any other.
References:
Helen Edgar and Tanya Atkin, ‘What is Monotropism? Understanding a Neuroaffirming Theory of Autism.’ (4 September 2025) https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/what-is-monotropism
Robert Cecil Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (2008)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)