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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Coding while we sleep

It's midnight and I really want to be coding. I'm half way or so through adding a git-annex-shell to git-annex, which will enable some nice features with ssh access. I've done the research, and written the documentation, laid all the necessary refactoring groundwork, and written much of the code and just have to connect it all up and test it.

This is a dangerous point to be at, because I have it all in my head, but I'm tired. If I start coding now, I could make a stupid mistake and find myself stuck in a blind alley at 5 am. I've been there before. Even if I avoid hard stuff, I'd surely look up and an hour or more would have gone by, it'd be past 1 am -- and I know that once I stop coding it can take me hours to spin my thoughts back down to the point where I can go to sleep.

Also, I can feel the back of my mind still working on something. Some bits feel like they might not quite mesh up right in my mental model. I don't consciously know what the problem is. I need to sleep on it; it will probably be clearer later. Like yesterday when I lifted a bag of groceries into the car and paused, realizing code I'd written two months ago had a major bug, one I'd never seen, in an edge case that had never came up, but was surely there.

I always assumed that when programmers got older and stopped coding late it was because they couldn't take the strain. Nah. We're just coding even as we sleep. :)

~Joey

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