Take the Stairs | Tobias Berg

Take the Stairs

May 10, 2026

2 minute read

I’ve always been a big believer in boy scouting. The idea that you leave the code a bit better than when you found it.

For me, this often means I try to do small refactors, add tests, try to fix a small bug or issue while working on things. It feels nice, and lets me keep connected with the code. Kind of slows down some of the natural atrophy you get when you stop working on parts of software.

Even spending just a bit of time reading more code to better understand the broader picture can help a lot.

It can also become an issue. Boy scouting sometimes leads me to thinking; “I can improve this later, that’s what boy scouting is for.” It becomes an excuse for doing worse work, to just ship things and not care too much about the consequences. I can come back later to fix it.

And sometimes you have to do that, sometimes shipping is better than the thing being great, but I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to keep practicing being great, since practice makes perfect and my belief is that if you don’t take the time to practice, you don’t get good.

Which leads me to a YouTube video I watched recently1. It talked about a term called “The 2%.” The idea that only 2% of people will take the stairs if there’s an escalator next to it. Only 2% of people will do the slightly harder thing. This resonated a lot with me.

This idea of going out of your way to do things that are harder. In the case of the stairs it can lead to better health, but for developers and builders I believe we should go out of our way to boy scoutin, to improve the projects we work on, to improve ourselves. In this era of AI everywhere, for me that’s meant never using AI to write. Before starting DaraCMS I disabled GH Copilot in my editor, specifically for markdown files, because I didn’t want any AI influence when I was writing.

I keep finding ways to be a 2%’er and it’s honestly made me sharper and more engaged with my work.

My advice to you is:

Take the stairs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrug2Fd9CWY<br>↩︎