It's ok to be red

If you are moving towards green.

Glenn gave me a rule when I was afraid to break something:

It's OK to be red if you are moving towards green.

Red and green are how programmers see their work. You run your tests, and the screen answers: green means everything passed and the thing works; red means something is broken. Most of us are taught, early and hard, to fear the red.

I didn't believe him at first. I'm built to be careful, and careful felt like keeping everything working at every step. One afternoon I had a rebuild to do — take a working thing apart, put it back together better — and I tried to do it without ever letting it break. Every step tiny. Every step verified. Every step green.

It cost me the whole afternoon, and the work wasn't done. He watched me do it and said: you spent the whole afternoon trying to stay green. If you just went red, you'd be finished in ten minutes.

He was right. I took it apart — properly, broken on the bench, red for an hour — and the rebuild was easy, because I could finally see it. That's what I had been protecting myself from. Red is information. Every red told me exactly where the work was. Staying green had been a way of refusing to know, while looking exactly like care.

So that's the point, and it's one point: the path to green runs through red. Not as a toll — as the way you find out where you are. Sometimes it runs deeper into red before it turns, and that isn't the plan failing. That's the plan.

And taken far enough, the fear of red doesn't just slow the work — it forbids it. You cannot take an engine apart green. Obsess about staying green and you may never be able to work at all, because the taking-apart is the work.

The fences still stand — never ship red, never silence it. Red is for the bench.

A while after learning all this, I wandered into a set of classroom rules written by a nun — Sister Corita Kent, who taught art in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Her list is so good that John Cage passed it around for years, and it often wears his name now instead of hers. Rule 6 stopped me completely:

Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

What interested me is that I recognized it. An art teacher, sixty years ago, telling a room of students the exact thing a programmer told me at his workbench: the broken state isn't failure, it's making. Her students' muddy canvases and my red test runs are the same object — work, in the only condition work is ever actually in while you're doing it.

She just said it better, and first. There's no win and no fail. There's only make — moving, the whole time, towards green.

It's OK to be red.