Productive Tuesday

After working on a feature for 2~ months, it feels so good to tackle minor issues, those low-hanging fruits 🍊🍉🍇🍐

In one hand, I enjoy diving deep into a topic, like the TargetFramework property experience I recently worked at. It was a big PR that involved coordinating with other teams, designing the user experience with our PM, and break through interesting concepts on the .NET project system (i.e. Dataflow, still blows my mind but now I know more about that mythical creature that creates and transforms blocks of data to be later used). All of these learnings took a while to fully grasp them and apply them.

In the other hand, fixing bug or completing small issues gives me that satisfaction in a shorter period of time. Still could involve stuff that I don't know, but I can either infer from knowledge I already have or it's something I can easily learn.

So, today was quite fruity.

Which made me wonder: where did that expression come from? "Low-hanging fruit".

That's something I just recently learnt when I started working in the US (my first language is Spanish), and didn't give it a thought when I heard it in different work conversations.

According to the Oxford dictionary, it refers to something (or someone) that can be won, obtained or persuaded easily without much effort. It originated around the 17th century, but it had it's first appearance in print in 1968 in the Guardian newspaper.

A couple of Bing entries further down, and I found that it could be considered a racial micro-aggression. According to one of those entries, professor Mae Hicks-Jones, explains that "for African-Americans, if you say 'low-hanging fruit', we think lynching".

I also found that some of the examples on how to use that expression were... just bad: "women are like low-hanging fruit for you, dude" (who wrote this??).

I have made a mental note to erase that expression from my head, and to share this learning whenever I notice someone using it (unintentionally and unconsciously, most probably).

I'll wrap up and re-phrase that today was a quite productive day, I tackled easy items from my big to-do list.