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Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
111–120 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#112I once got really ill and went into a high fever, the whole time in my head I was debugging myself with code, was very strange.
Other then that I never dream of code, but sometimes when I am half asleep in bed I start thinking about issues and playing out scenarios I could try to fix something, or implement a new feature.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#113Often. I have, occasionally, actually implemented what I dreamt of. To date it's only worked once. Which, when you think about it, is pretty damn amazing.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#114Yes, but not in the literal sense for me. I never see any text or code but rather some abstract version of the problem I'm trying to solve. I dislike it to be honest, it makes me feel like I'm not getting any rest, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night from a code dream only to continue in that loop while I'm half awake. One time I went to sleep after starting a take home code test for a job interview;…
Would you mind sharing why they (said they) ultimately chose not to extend an offer? Just curious about an anecdote from a hiring/recruiting perspective.
They never gave a reason. That said, I felt like the interview with my potential team mates (one of the 3 interview rounds that day) really did not go as well as I would have liked. I could have done better describing my current work and projects. We did some whiteboard design question and ran out of time, looking back I could have done a lot better on that had I put more thought into it. I'm not bitter or anything, it was not my best in person interview by a long shot.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminded me of a dream I used to have of getting into the car, opening up the Chrome developer tools, and using Javascript to drive.
> This reminded me of a dream I used to have of getting into the car, opening up the Chrome developer tools, and using Javascript to drive. An aside. Reading some of the hilarious comments here I am inclined to think they could be compiled into a bestselling nerd comic
Oh wait, is someone doing this?
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#116I would have this dream that I could access the Lisp REPL that controlled my dream, but I would accidentally use the loop macro wrong and I'd be paralyzed in front of my computer for the rest of my dream, unable to kill the process.
Actually terrifying thinking about it again. Made me very wary of live programming XD
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#117all the time! I dreamt I was in a builder factory pattern and had a full on battle with team create(). I was on team build()
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#118When I was 14 in 1986 writing Atari ST stuff I had something come to me in a dream.
The ST had a notoriously slow text output system. The display was a bitmap and there was no hardware acceleration. Somebody called Darek Mihocka came out with 'Quick ST' which made the text display quicker than stock. As a newbie I wanted to beat this, so I learned 68000 assembly and did the usual optimisation - unrolling loops, precomputing bitmaps etc. I got faster than Quick ST but then he had an update which nearly doubled my speed.
I did everything I could to work out what he'd done, including looking at the Motorola reference manuals, nothing came up. I was going crazy. Bear in mind these were the days when there was no middleware, it was you versus the hardware, and if they did it better it's because their code was better.
So I went to bed one night and the 'move.p' opcode came to mind. I woke up and read about it - turns out this opcode took a 16 bit number and split it into 2 8bit codes and placed them 2 bytes apart. This matched the ST interleaved bitmap perfectly - I doubled my speed and beat Darek.
So, yeah, a dream did actually improve my code. I do miss those days where decent code beat driver, middleware and other issues.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#119If you think the dreams are weird how about this. There was a period when I was was spending a lot of time writing code every day. And there were some nights where I'd fall asleep then partially wake up and look at the window to see light cast on the curtain in a way that would sometimes spell a message that helped me debug, figure out a problem, or discover a new technique. Or give me an idea for an operating system's logo...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone dream of code?
#120The first few years in my career when I'd code for a few hours non-stop then crash on the beanbag at my desk, I dreamt a lot of bug fixes, very few of which stuck in my mind after I woke up. It's basically the last thought I had before I went to sleep which affected my dreams all my life. If that last thought is code, then so is the content of the dream.