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At what time of day do famous programmers work?

ivan.bessarabov.com

11–20 of 215 posts

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#11
post #3
post #2

There is a possible issue though - would they commit immediately after coding - how long do they need to work on a commit before actually committing it?

Another issue is that when you travel to a different timezone, you don't necessarily update the timezone of your system.

Aren't most devices configured to adjust automatically these days?

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#14
post #2

There is a possible issue though - would they commit immediately after coding - how long do they need to work on a commit before actually committing it?

And perhaps they commit first thing in the morning, after a nightly test succeeded (or perhaps they simply forget to commit at night).

Another useful graph would be commit volume versus time (where volume is e.g. number of lines modified)

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#15
post #2

There is a possible issue though - would they commit immediately after coding - how long do they need to work on a commit before actually committing it?

For one or two isolated commits, that is a fair question. But with hundreds I think it evens out. A more detailed analysis could also take in account the number of changes. How many files per commit? How many lines, maybe? The day of week is also a very interesting metric, that is very visible e.g. on github's timeline. I know my busiest days in terms of commits are in the middle of the week, a marked decrease on Fri…

It wouldn't even out - you never commit before writing code, so any measurement based on commit times will be consistently biased to later times.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#17

I'm a forgetful person, so I commit very often but with label "tmp", and later I squash them all into 1 proper commit before pushing. I'm sure I'm not alone, so commit time can't be used as barometer.

I dislike the apparent inability to label groups of changes with `git stash`, so instead before leaving a branch with in-progress changes I'll commit them all as "WIP". Then, when I return to the branch, I'll check if the previous commit was WIP (`git log -1`), and if so will reset it (`git reset HEAD~1`). It's the best workflow I've discovered for dealing with this problem, and it means that I don't lose my commit history which is otherwise very clean.

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#18
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue is that when you travel to a different timezone, you don't necessarily update the timezone of your system.

Aren't most devices configured to adjust automatically these days?

I personally don't travel with my desktop :)

Generally I take a small light laptop when traveling, and then just connect to the desktop back home for doing real work such as committing code.

I know that at a lot of Big Cos do not let their engineers to have source code on laptops anyway (so easily lost and stolen).

Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?

#19
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue is that when you travel to a different timezone, you don't necessarily update the timezone of your system.

Aren't most devices configured to adjust automatically these days?

Neither my Linux nor Windows 10 laptops do.
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