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At what time of day do famous programmers work?

ivan.bessarabov.com

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

#81

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

dchest wrote: post #69
dahart wrote: post #65

Personally, I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time. For at least 15 years I’ve had a policy - and so have the people on my teams - to avoid merging or committing to public branches at night or just before & during weekends so that you don’t accidentally hose other people on the team, who rely on automated builds & testing. We write code at all hours, but wait to commit/…

Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

The policy is to risk breaking stuff only when people are in the office. It's a good concept.

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

#82

Post by inlined »

stinkbug9o wrote: post #78
dahart wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches That is what I’m saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch. Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I’ve worked, plenty of people skip branching when they’re making what they think are “small” chan…

You’re describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes. One can commit and push to branches all day. Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea, except where teams have implemented a process that can handle it

Many of us do a “squash merge” (use git rebase to compress to meaningful points in a CR and again before merging to master or feature branches). This creates a clean history at the expense of not being able to stalk others work at high granularity or get as large a score on github’s tracker.

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

#83

Post by dahart »

stinkbug9o wrote: post #78
dahart wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches That is what I’m saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch. Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I’ve worked, plenty of people skip branching when they’re making what they think are “small” chan…

You’re describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes. One can commit and push to branches all day. Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea, except where teams have implemented a process that can handle it

> You’re describing merges, not commits, or pushes to remotes.

Both merges and commits can be pushed. I’m not exactly sure what distinction you’re trying to make.

Also, btw, I’m using git terminology, but not everyone uses git. I’m including my experience on teams that use Perforce, for example.

> One can commit and push to branches all day. Merging them to master without a heads up is a bad idea.

Yeah, right, exactly. You agree with me. My policy is about putting anything new in the master branch during off hours, because breaking changes that evade the tests may not get fixed until work hours, and prevent other people from working at night or over the weekend.

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

#84

Post by scottmcf »

segmondy wrote: post #76

Every time of the day, it's like asking at what time does a musician compose, or an artist paint or a author write. Surely, we can consider the physical activity work, but the mental activity is also work and precedes the physical. The brain churns on the problem at hand most of the time even when we are away from the computer. I would even be bold to say, more so when we are away from the computer and not distracted…

Absolutely this. Working on something else entirely is often the best way to resolve difficult logic problems that I get stuck on.

Just throw it on the "subconscious pile" and let my brain chew away on it in the background.

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

#85

Post by inlined »

samhh wrote: post #17
wiradikusuma wrote: post #10

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 h…

I hate stash because it’s too easy to accidentally pop. I just use a lot of branches, get familiar with git rebase, and learn about git reflog in case I screw up.

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

#88

Post by efficax »

dahart wrote: post #72
dchest wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches?

> Strange policy about commits — why just not push at night or during weekends? Why's everyone not working on branches That is what I’m saying. The policy is avoid pushes to master. My policy does apply to branches too once there are more than a few people in the branch. Lots of people do work in branches, but everywhere I’ve worked, plenty of people skip branching when they’re making what they think are “small” chan…

We have emergency production rollback to the last working deploy. That's what you do when breaking changes are committed to master. Letting devs commit to master directly? Horrible idea.

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

#89

Post by inlined »

paco3346 wrote: post #73
tuna-piano wrote: post #64

As someone who generally works a 9-5 job at a company where most people are expected to work 9-5, can anyone explain if there are any norms or rules that enable someone to work such abnormal hours at their companies? Do companies like Google not care as much about work hours? I can't imagine anyone showing up at 2pm at any of the places I've worked, regardless of how productive they were.

I think this really depends on the attitude of the company and specific managers. Each quarter I'm given a list of projects and just need to have them done by the end of the quarter. Thankfully my boss has seen that I'm much more productive with my abnormal schedule so I'm inclined that this type of freedom probably comes on a case by case basis.

I know a former Technical fellow at Microsoft. He told me people gave him crap & joked it must be nice to be a TL and have the power to leave at 3P. On the other hand it had been years since he hadn’t watched the sun rise drinking coffee at the office. He told me he tries to make sure he doesn’t get out of bed till he hears his coffee machine go off at some time like 4A.

Also, at google I’ve known people to work part of the day from home or have moderately shifted schedules to avoid traffic. Though there are often team-wide “core hours” where you are expected to be available for a meeting.

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

#90

Post by inlined »

mattlondon wrote: post #18
cptskippy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

At least Google has made an exception for me when I’m working on code hosted on Github. Most of that is (or will be) public so there’s low risk.
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