81–90 of 137 posts
But anyway if you see someone being fucking awesome at something, I can almost guarantee you that they have no special talent or "magic tricks." They have just spent, and are spending, lots and lots and LOTS of time doing what they are so good at.
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
Well, shit. Is this even possible in web development these days? With the exception of jQuery, there hasn't been a single JS or backend framework that I've used from one year to the next.
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Massive caffeine abuse. I drank truly insane amounts of coffee.
how massive? I can't always plan my crunches, but since I started taking caffeine pills - I take 4 pills, equiv 4 coffees, right before really focusing on something, then I can relax in a different part of the day where it doesn't matter if it's slower. So I go between 0 and 8 coffees per day worth of caffeine, depending on what I'm doing. I've completely stopped drinking coffee and save a bunch of time that way (exc…
This site is fun, btw: http://www.caffeineinformer.com/the-caffeine-database
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Massive caffeine abuse. I drank truly insane amounts of coffee.
how massive? I can't always plan my crunches, but since I started taking caffeine pills - I take 4 pills, equiv 4 coffees, right before really focusing on something, then I can relax in a different part of the day where it doesn't matter if it's slower. So I go between 0 and 8 coffees per day worth of caffeine, depending on what I'm doing. I've completely stopped drinking coffee and save a bunch of time that way (exc…
In 2007, I finished my bba, received an angel investment, and started a company. Three months later (and with my investor's enthusiastic support), I started a non-profit street magazine. About two years later, I ended up in hospital with stroke symptoms and blood pressure on the 'how are you alive?' end of the scale. Because of this, I beg anyone who wants to be as highly productive as I was to please take care of yo…
Thanks for your comment. It scared me a little and gave me a perspective. First thing: I hope you're all doing OK now and your health improves. I'm a bit envious of all the great hackers getting plenty of nice Open Source projects done (mostly Rust community, because that's what I'm into). Secretly, I would like to be a open-source-star-developer, but I can't see it ever happening... Between dayjob, family-time/babyw…
It sounds like you've got a lot to live for - if you would ever like to talk, my email is in my profile. Be safe and thanks for your kind wishes! :)
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It started as a spiral of being overworked and not sleeping enough. As I slept less, my coffee consumption skyrocketed and my diet grew worse and worse. I tried to exercise three times a week, but between being tired, mild stomach problems from too much coffee and unhealthy food, and energy spikes, my intensity in the gym slipped and I eventually started skipping more workouts. It all spiralled because all of those t…
>mild stomach problems from too much coffee This is a problem I've ran into in the past but on fairly severe scales. I was drinking at least 2 pots (~24 cups) of coffee per day and ended up in the hospital a few time due to stomach problems. I've sense limited my consumption of coffee and switched to pure caffeine pills (mixed with water) and my quality of life has improved quite dramatically. Gone are the constant b…
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
Without stopping to think about design? I can't imagine that.
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
> If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. Without stopping to think about design? I can't imagine that.
That doesn't mean there's no design work involved - far from it, I recall reading through the design notes for both GFS and MapReduce while I was at Google and being amazed at the possibilities they'd considered. But the design work is largely up-front: it's picking among alternative high-level architectures and figuring out what the consequences of that choice will be. Once the choice has been made, you don't need to make a whole lot of follow-on decisions; a lot of the code follows strictly from the choices you made up-front, and you aren't writing a line and thinking "Oh, was that a good idea? I better do it some other way". It also helps that these high-productivity programmers are highly experienced, and they specialize in a domain, so they've seen many of the low-level pitfalls before and avoid them instinctively.
It's a very different experience from writing end-user code. I'll work on a webapp, get some data on the screen, and then discover "No, the flow is wrong; we should present this and this widget independently on another screen and alter these other widgets based on the values there", and then that will have a cascading effect throughout the program that requires a bunch of other changes. By contrast, when I wrote an HTML parser, the behavior was already fully specified by the HTML5 spec. I had to make a few judgment calls regarding "What's the ideal API for client code? What are the boundaries of responsibility for this parser? What data representations should I use?", and I ended up having to revise them significantly, but that was largely because it was my first major C library, and a more experienced C programmer would know instinctively what the right choice was. Much of the time spent on the parser was straight-line implementing the spec and then tracking down bugs in the implementation.
Chances are you are already productive. So, an anecdote: I noticed that when I make lists of things to do, and I see progress on the items ticked off, I know I am productive. No anxiety after that. (I usually write down the number of hours taken to complete each task and sometimes flip through the list to reassure myself with indulgent self-adulation). Without the list, even though I am killing items, I still feel un…