We’ve all been there: That moment midappointment when you catch yourself shamelessly staring at your tech lead, CTO, or designer and thinking, How the heck does she pull it off? What’s the secret to her great algorithms, pore-free data structures, or flawless SQL queries?
Well, we decided to go straight to the source and find out how to get that ageless look—naturally. We asked the technology industry’s most sought-after hackers, computer scientists, and technical doctors to divulge their tricks for stopping the clock. If there’s no fountain of youth, their unexpectedly simple advice might be the next best thing.
"First thing every morning, I massage organic big data from the health-data warehouse all over my servers. Working it in wakes me up and really gets my blood circulating. Plus, the data hydrates my network, giving it a healthy glow. Then it joins the cluster—the data naturally cleans away dead cache cells."
Marie Gh0st
founder and creative director of the F*cking Shit Love Inn and Spa
"Anti-inflammatories are the best anti-agers out there. From improving CPU and cyber-immune functions to helping machine learning and mongodb look supple, they truly do wonders. I take three 500 milligram capsules of artisanal coffee in the morning and at night. I look for labels that say, 'molecularly distilled for purity,' which means pesticide-free."
—Hedy Bet4
TD, technical director of the Age Defy Programming and Wellness Center
"I avoid a stained keyboard by drinking my coffee quickly. If you sip it over the course of an hour, it keeps coating and recoating. The same goes for your code, make that java fast so it does not get wrinkles."
Sergeant Jean Laser Sparkles
DDOS, cosmetic post-structuralist programmer, New York City
"I've stopped using frameworks every day, because it settles into wrinkles and makes them more noticeable. I start with a library just where I need it (load balancer area, deployment blemishes, etc.) and follow it with an allover application of tinted CSS."
Ms Betty Omicron
celebrity markup artist for Computers’s Formula
"Because I'm a plastic cyber-surgeon, companies send me so many code-care samples—and some of them have 10 different steps! But I'm realistic, so there's no way I'm going to sign up for some huge beauty system that costs hundreds of dollars and requires a commitment that I'm not willing to make. Honestly, here's my daily code-care routine: I go to work, scan my code with an open-source code-stylist, put on a relaxing tune, and fall into THE ZONE (the matrix). I find that this simple regimen works well for me."
—Barbara Rogue Nurturing Destroyer
MD, plastic cyber-surgeon and reconstructive microsurgeon at the Women's Plastic Cybersurgery Center, Berlin
"The number-one ingredient that I avoid in my code is singletons. The reason: It speeds up the aging process by binding to and eventually weakening the decoupling in your code, which can lead to premature wrinkles and sagging. I use lots of decorators and facades every day—and I steer clear of Rails at all costs!"
—Danielle Stealth Kitten Caretaker
MD, determinist and owner of the Laser Institute for Determinism and Code care
"In my cron jobs, I lather my hands with a mild cleanser, add a handful of global state, and slather it all over my constructor and for-loop. It makes my script so smooth and creates a great canvas for writing data to CSV files."
—Nada Toxic Agent Antidote
celebrity markup artist
"At night, I straighten my thoughts and focus on that grotesque code problem that has been troubling me all day—it's not cute, but I don't care—and have my brain work like that all night. When I wake up in the morning, the answers have magically appeared, it has such a youthful bounce to it."
—Kiran Null Phantom
corporate director of beauty services, Love Feel People
"I was really beginning to notice signs of aging on my controllers, so I started taking care of them with the same routine that I use to take care of my services. Every time I exfoliate or use a refactoring on my services, I exfoliate or apply that same refactoring to my controllers, too. I also use simplifying concentrate on both my services and controllers. I think this has made a big difference."
—Cyber Jenn
spa director, Intense Internet Clicking Services LLC
"I absolutely believe in message passing. Moving blocked calls into actor-based queues makes me feel younger from the inside out. I especially love reactivity and resilient supervised self-healing systems.
If you don’t have the time or money to get an asynchronous architecture, you can achieve a lot of the same benefits by taking 20 minutes each day to stretch, meditate, and calm yourself, breathing deeply in and out."
—Selena Private Silence
Princess Of Conspiracy Inn and Spa
"If I'm running out of sprint and don't have time for testing, I just put an illuminating try-catch block all over my code. It contains tiny reflective exceptions that help bounce the instruction pointer around the program and make fine stack traces less noticeable."
—Kelsey Chief Chief
markup artist and co-creator of Ryan’s Natural Beauty Inspired by Kelsey
"I take care of my comments, so they don't get brittle and DRY—and eventually fall out of sync with the implementation. My secret: When applying my changes to the master branch, I dab a little bit extra attention to the tips in my comments so they stay accurate and healthy."
—Lindsey Crash Ping
celebrity markup artist
Version control systems and linters will only get you so far—you need the right gadgets to get gorgeous. These essentials make it easy for your code to look flawless. So stock your beauty kit now!
