Maybe maintainers commit "early", merging other people's work that piles up at night, while contributors commit "late", at the end of the workday?
At what time of day do famous programmers work?
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Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#32The work patterns would be more interesting. Does Bellard think the whole project through for days and then simply hacks it down in a few hours? Does one of them use TLA+? Do they use iterative approaches, where the first few versions are really buggy?
From the projects they mention, the only one I can see really benefiting from TLA+ would be memcached. For most things it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use it, unless you're writing a potentially distributed app. If you just want to model a regular program, then you'd be better off looking at PlusCal, which is more oriented to regular programs that aren't designed to be distributed. It compiles down to TLA+ so you get the same benefits, but with an easier to understand syntax.
Edit: Also if you want to learn about how famous programmers work, then there's no better source than the book Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. http://www.codersatwork.com/
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#33[deleted]
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#34I'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 h…
Yes I think your workflow is more correct than using stash. Work that is fully intended to enter the branch should be in commits, not stashes.
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#35TIL who the hell these 'famous' folks are!
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#36Fabrice Bellard apparently merges commits to Qemu between 21 and 22, and to FFmpeg between 22 and 23.
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#37I'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.
When I'm working on a new change I always create a new branch and (almost) always just work against one commit. I'll just keep amending that commit. I generally work out my tickets so that they are small enough that I don't have too many concerns with each branch, so maintaining a commit history isn't all that useful. I'm pretty sure I do loose out on the "looking really busy with lots of commits" in my github history tracking, but I could care less.
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#38I wonder how much this is related to age.
Quite a bit i'd imagine.
I used to write lots of code at all hours of the day, 8 hours at work, 6+ hours at home. Then i had kids, and while i still write code 8 hours a day at work, i rarely find the time to write anything in my spare time anymore.
Every now and then i have "some project" that i'm working on, but it's mostly in bursts of 2-3 days, followed by 3-5 days of "doing nothing". The 2-3 days are _not_ weekends, and i usually end up losing sleep over it.
Kids are relentless, and no matter how late you stayed up, they still get up at 6 AM, and needs to be taken to kindergarten/school, and requires you to be (mentally) present in the afternoon/evening.
I guess you could talk about a "soft burnout" happening from the 2-3 days burst.
I'm trying to change the burst periods into more frequent, shorter periods of 1-2 hours, hoping the increased frequency will reduce the "ramp up" time while getting "into the zone".
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#39Author is probably a non-native English speaker, so, gentle correction: "At what time of day do non famous programmers work?"
Re: At what time of day do famous programmers work?
#40My gut reaction to this was the same as everyone else - to question the validity of using commits as a measurement of time worked.
But then I read further and realized that this isn't a research study, it is just a clever script to output some data from github. So I'm going to go run it on a couple of my projects, see what it says, and enjoy that someone put it together.