71–80 of 116 posts
I shared it with my significant other, in order for her to better understand the grumpy responses she sometimes gets when asking seemingly innocuous questions like "would you like some tea?"
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As another anecdata, the only way I've landed there more intentionally is with the two beer buzz. Working late on a project that is behind and you grab two slices and a six pack. Two beers in (and one every hour) and all of a sudden you just start tearing through code. I've had this happen to me countless times. I think it is because a lot of engineers have a brain that is spinning 1000% all the time and a couple of…
>choosing your line and focusing on executing it, everything else in life falls away. For me, this is skiing. Complete focus and attention on the task at hand. Winter, come soon.
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No amount of control of my environment will put me in the zone when I'm working on boring code. Crud framework? I'll be reading HN while going through the motions. Code review? Time for some stimulating music (though not too stimulating, I do need to pay attention to the code review). But give me something interesting - a real challenge - and I'm able to get into the zone, the hours flying by like they were minutes.…
>No amount of control of my environment will put me in the zone when I'm working on boring code. adderall
I haven't been in the zone for months. It's mostly general dissatisfaction with my job, but it's gotten worse of late. On an average day, there will be 4 hours of calls spread an hour or less apart for the first half of the day, with the potential for surprise calls for the rest of the day. The irony is that a lot of these calls are about why things aren't getting done. The surprise calls are the worst. Even if I mig…
The clients might find that they prefer interacting with a more business/people oriented person, rather than a stressed out INTP. That person could also help you schedule and estimate work, without needing to have programming skills themselves; another source of stress mitigated. In theory, recovering your full productivity would lead to a net increase in the value of your services, despite the expense of this new person on staff.
“The Dexterous Butcher” Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music. “Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine…
Also: The Tao of Programming [1] 4.4 Prince Wang's programmer was coding software. His fingers danced upon the keyboard. The program compiled without and error message, and the program ran like a gentle wind. "Excellent!" the Prince exclaimed. "Your technique is faultless!" "Technique?" said the programmer, turning from his terminal, "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all techniques! When I first began to program, I wou…
I did enjoy the story though.
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Controlling the environment makes me more productive than I'm normally, but definitely doesn't automatically put me "in the zone".
What puts me in the zone is the problem I am working on. Just thinking about it for a couple of minutes and I'm in.
It happens about 3-4 out of 5 times just because I real like the software I'm building or because I get thrilled about how to make something 'boring' a masterpiece to look at or even because I know there is something I don't understand.
It's almost like a drug to keep coding en digging deeper every day. To a point where I even feel somekind of a huge pressure in the middle of night to 'profit' very hard of the last minutes i' m awake.
Doesn't feel healthy anymore haha. But I just love to much somehow
Good luck ever getting in the zone if you do anything with modern blockchains (especially Ethereum.) All of the documentation is terrible and you waste hours trying to find a bug only to realise it was a problem with the library all along... Assuming of course: that you don't give up after seeing the "developer tools." What little tools you have for solving problems feels like you're trying to carve a delicate ice st…
Follow the boy scouts rule: leave documentation and code in a better state than you found it. If enough of us do that it'll naturally get better over time.
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No amount of control of my environment will put me in the zone when I'm working on boring code. Crud framework? I'll be reading HN while going through the motions. Code review? Time for some stimulating music (though not too stimulating, I do need to pay attention to the code review). But give me something interesting - a real challenge - and I'm able to get into the zone, the hours flying by like they were minutes.…
>No amount of control of my environment will put me in the zone when I'm working on boring code. adderall