Alternative title: “Improve your morning programming with this one trick that Project Manager’s don’t want you to know!”
I feel great in the morning: focused, clear-headed, not waiting for lunch to roll around. No sugar-crashes. An entire day may pass without feeling tired or hungry. But this is a recent state of affairs!
A long time ago..
Back when the MS Surface weighted 200 pounds, back when game-devs tripped over themselves to write deep inheritance chains instead of component based entities, before GIT replaced SVN, SASS replaced CSS/LESS, before Heroku and Continuous Integration turned the web-dev world upside down. Back then.. I ate really badly!
A couple of years later, I met a really nice girl, and she taught me all about fruits and vegetables and this amazing thing called the fruit-and-veggie-smoothie. And nothing was ever the same.
Today: Smoothie.sh
Starting the day off with a smoothie makes me feel more energetic, focused, lighter, less hungry and less cranky. Much better than Captain Crunch filled with Monster! Also, there is no crash or cravings afterwards.
This script lets you to inject a fruit+veggie payload into a running process, executing a nutritious breakfast with a steady supply of energy and nutrients, resulting in root access to your own health. It’s been heavily documented all around the web.
The implementation is simple yet robust. In fact, you can streamline the entire process in a 5 minute morning cron job.
- pull green veggies out of your fridge and wash them like theres money in them
- concatenate with some frozen fruits
- compile using blender –liquify for a minute until all traces of vegetables have been annihilated
- deploy the build in your ~ or /dev environment and iterate on feedback from QA
The specs for the smoothie above:
- Mixed greens including Spinach (you can do straight up Spinach, maybe throw in some kale, sky is the limit)
- Pea Sprouts, Celery, and some Cucumber
- Pineapple bits, Banana, Blueberries, Mango
I prefer frozen fruit. They cool down the entire drink — making it more tasty and fun, especially in the summer.
Every ingredient has their own character and use-case, like libraries and frameworks.
Some notes based on my taste buds (which don’t like veggies!):
- Spinach tends to be pretty neutral while Kale is fairly bitter.
- Pea Sprouts and Snow Peas add a nice sweet grassy taste, like walking through a freshly cut field on a cool spring day.
- Celery isn’t tasty, but one or two sticks aren’t noticeable once liquefied.
- Cucumber is refreshing, like a program that compiles on first try.
- Raspberries leave behind a lot of seeds, so if you like to chew your smoothie, go for it.
- Mango adds a “dry” texture.
- Bananas make it creamier! Like ice-cream! When starting out, definitely put in a whole banana!
- Pineapple adds a lot of sweetness, they do a great job of combating the vegetable taste.
- Blueberries add a lot of color and some sweetness.
For optimal taste, find a store that carries fresh organic foods without any sulfur or other preservatives (you don’t need it to sit for weeks), and has lots of traffic and fast turnover. The best places I know of in NYC are Trader Joe’s and the Food Coop.
TL;DR
If you don’t like to eat fruits and veggies, a smoothie is an incredibly easy and efficient way to get that stuff inside you. Highly recommended, would do business with again, A++++++ super fast shipping.
Awesome ideas, especially snow peas. I’ve been perfecting my own kale smoothie for a few months now. Key components:
acts as healthy (required):
Kale (handful) and parsley (handful)
acts as creamy:
A banana.
acts as tangy:
One of the following
– mango
– green apple
– pair