Keep 6

[Pierpont Oldham]

Writing is a fantastic tool for processing and communicating abstract ideas. And developers are steeped in abstract ideas! From system design to the finest implementation details, we keep a tremendous amount of information in our heads.

You can use a dev journal to keep track of your emotions, too. Morning Pages are a popular technique for clearing the "clutter" in your head at the start of each day. You can try this approach with your dev journal. Are you nervous, anxious, excited? Get these feelings down on paper so you can clear your head and give the technical problems your undivided attention.

At the start of each working session (this could be a day, ticket, or pomodoro session), define your goal for the session, even if it seems really obvious. What do you want to achieve today? Do you have a clear, well-defined coding task you need to accomplish? Do you need to explore something in the codebase? Are you prototyping? Do you need to test a hypothesis? How will you reduce the ambiguity?

Get in the habit of writing at the beginning and end of every coding session. Keep the journal nearby; it should always be a tab away. You should be able to check your notes or make more notes at a glance.

As I said earlier, your dev journal should include whatever you need to be effective. For example, after experimenting with Morning Pages in my personal life, I found it useful to voice my anxieties and negative self-talk.

Dogs, too, were once largely unrestricted, but over time public sentiment changed and policies followed. No longer giving Bad Kitty and other cats the run of the place would be a significant cultural shift. What, I wondered, would it take for us to treat Fluffy as we treat Fido?

To a growing number of pawrents, the answer is simple: Keep Pearl under lock and key, as 63 percent of cat owners now do. That number is up from 35 percent in the 1990s; around that time, more municipalities across the country began to enact cat licensing laws and pass ordinances that limited felines on the landscape, spurred by animal welfare concerns and two highly publicized studies pointing to a massive avian death toll.

Ultimately, Norris aims to refine cat predation estimates across the continent and create a database of which species are hit hardest and when, which might reinforce keeping cats inside at least during those times. In Puerto Rico, Nemes is taking a different approach to determining their diet by analyzing the DNA in scat. This local snapshot might reveal whether cats are preying upon endemic species, migratory species that stop over or winter on the island, or other vulnerable wildlife.

Unowned cats are an even trickier subject. Following the science, many U.S. conservationists would like to see colonies removed: Healthy, sociable cats would be adopted out, and those too sick or feral would be housed in sanctuaries or euthanized. Passing and enforcing license laws, outdoor feeding bans, and roaming restrictions would likely further reduce populations. Versions of such policies have gained ground elsewhere: In Iceland, several towns require cats to be inside at night or always, and Walldorf, Germany, bans roaming when Crested Larks breed. Australia, meanwhile, is removing all feral cats from the landscape.

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A keep is a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars have debated the scope of the word keep, but usually consider it to refer to large towers in castles that were fortified residences, used as a refuge of last resort should the rest of the castle fall to an adversary. The first keeps were made of timber and formed a key part of the motte-and-bailey castles that emerged in Normandy and Anjou during the 10th century; the design spread to England, Portugal,[2] south Italy and Sicily. As a result of the Norman invasion of 1066, use spread into Wales during the second half of the 11th century and into Ireland in the 1170s. The Anglo-Normans and French rulers began to build stone keeps during the 10th and 11th centuries, including Norman keeps, with a square or rectangular design, and circular shell keeps. Stone keeps carried considerable political as well as military importance and could take a decade or more to build.

In the 15th century, the protective function of keeps was compromised by improved artillery. For example, in 1464 during the Wars of the Roses, the keep of Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast, previously considered to be impregnable, was defeated with bombards.[3] By the 16th century, keeps were slowly falling out of fashion as fortifications and residences. Many were destroyed in civil wars between the 17th and 18th centuries or incorporated into gardens as an alternative to follies. During the 19th century, keeps became fashionable once again, and in England and France, a number were restored or redesigned by Gothic architects. Despite further damage to many French and Spanish keeps during the wars of the 20th century, keeps now form an important part of the tourist and heritage industry in Europe.

Since the 16th century, the English word keep has commonly referred to large towers in castles.[4] The word originates from around 1375 to 1376, coming from the Middle English term kype, meaning basket or cask, and was a term applied to the shell keep at Gunes, said to resemble a barrel.[5] The term came to be used for other shell keeps by the 15th century.[4] By the 17th century, the word keep lost its original reference to baskets or casks and was popularly assumed to have come from the Middle English word keep, meaning to hold or to protect.[4]

Early on, the use of the word keep became associated with the idea of a tower in a castle that would serve both as a fortified, high-status private residence and a refuge of last resort.[6] The issue was complicated by the building of fortified Renaissance towers in Italy called tenazza that were used as defences of last resort and were also named after the Italian for to hold or to keep.[4] By the 19th century, Victorian historians incorrectly concluded that the etymology of the words "keep" and tenazza were linked and that all keeps had fulfilled this military function.[4]

While the term remains in common academic use, some academics prefer to use the term donjon, and most modern historians warn against using the term "keep" simplistically.[10] The fortifications that we would today call keeps did not necessarily form part of a unified medieval style, nor were they all used in a similar fashion during the period.[10]

One contemporary account of these keeps comes from Jean de Colmieu around 1130, who described how the nobles of the Calais region would build "a mound of earth as high as they can and dig a ditch about it as wide and deep as possible. The space on top of the mound is enclosed by a palisade of very strong hewn logs, strengthened at intervals by as many towers as their means can provide. Inside the enclosure is a citadel, or keep, which commands the whole circuit of the defences. The entrance to the fortress is by means of a bridge, which, rising from the outer side of the moat and supported on posts as it ascends, reches to the top of the mound."[17] At Durham Castle, contemporaries described how the keep arose from the "tumulus of rising earth" with a keep reaching "into thin air, strong within and without", a "stalwart house...glittering with beauty in every part".[18] As well as having defensive value, keeps and mottes sent a powerful political message to the local population.[19]

Wooden keeps could be quite extensive in size and, as Robert Higham and Philip Barker have noted, it was possible to build "...very tall and massive structures."[20][nb 1] As an example of what these keeps may have comprised, the early 12th-century chronicler Lambert of Ardres described the wooden keep on top of the motte at the castle of Ardres, where the "...first storey was on the surface of the ground, where were cellars and granaries, and great boxes, tuns, casks, and other domestic utensils. In the storey above were the dwelling and common living-rooms of the residents in which were the larders, the rooms of the bakers and butlers, and the great chamber in which the lord and his wife slept...In the upper storey of the house were garret rooms...In this storey also the watchmen and the servants appointed to keep the house took their sleep."[22]

In the Holy Roman Empire, tall, free-standing, wooden (later stone), fighting towers called Bergfriede were commonly built by the 11th century, either as part of motte-and-bailey designs or, as part of Hohenburgen castles, with characteristic inner and outer courts.[23] Bergfriede, which take their name from the German for a belfry, had similarities to keeps, but are usually distinguished from them on account of Bergfriede having a smaller area or footprint, usually being non-residential and being typically integrated into the outer defences of a castle, rather than being a safe refuge of last resort.[24][nb 2]

The reasons for the transition from timber to stone keeps are unclear, and the process was slow and uneven, taking many years to take effect across the various regions.[31] Traditionally it was believed that stone keeps had been adopted because of the cruder nature of wooden buildings, the limited lifespan of wooden fortifications and their vulnerability to fire, but recent archaeological studies have shown that many wooden castles were as robust and as sophisticated as their stone equivalents.[32] Some wooden keeps were not converted into stone for many years and were instead expanded in wood, such as at Hen Domen.[33] Nonetheless, stone became increasingly popular as a building material for keeps for both military and symbolic reasons.[34]

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