At what time of day do famous programmers work? • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by khalilravanna » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

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/…

Looks like you already addressed that merge time != commit time. That being said, while it's hard to make a blanket statement about what part of the working process a commit falls, I'd venture a guess that it's usually at the end of a period of work. Given that, the commit time covers an indeterminate period of time before the commit's time. So having no commits at 6 AM doesn't mean the person isn't working at 6 AM, but it probably means they aren't working at 5 AM or 4 AM.

But that all being said, we only have a handful of people worth of data points and who's to say that Linus isn't someone who writes his code the previous day and commits it the next. Or that Guido isn't someone who makes lots of small commits as he's working. Hell, maybe they all squash multiple days worth of commits leaving it with a timestamp for a totally different time.

tl;dr: Yeah, I don't know that we can glean that much super reliably from this data set.

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

#112

Post by dahart » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #104

dahart wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, exactl…

The article is about the times of day Git commits were made, not the times of day they were pushed, nor the times of day people used other source-control systems like Perforce. You said, "I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time," citing your own policy of not pushing at night as an example of how "commit time" may not have anything to do with work time. Now you're saying…

I stand by my top comment, avoiding pushes Friday and waiting until Monday often leads to both code commit times on Monday and merge commit times on Monday. (Edit: and BTW I know this for a fact, because we monitored average commit times to make sure the policy was being adhered to.)

If you look at the code from the article, you’ll see that the author did not filter out merge commits. The word merge doesn’t even appear in the article. The OPs data includes merge commits.

You’re trying to draw a hard and idealized line that doesn’t exist in real companies. Squashes often happen right before push. Stashing for the weekend rather than committing is common. People unsafely leaving uncommitted changes in their workspace over the weekend is common. Most devs in my experience are not git experts, and they don’t always use git in best practices kinds of ways. That is made evident every time there’s a git thread on HN.

I am talking about commit time, my push policy affects my commit times. You can’t count on commit times to demonstrate anything.

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

#113

Post by dewey » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

numlock86 wrote: post #91

nojvek wrote: post #87

I guess only white male programmers are famous in programming ? Good job further propagating the stereotype.

I already commented on this somewhere else. What's the problem with that? Are you implying female/black programmers are different? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469963

No, he's implying that they are underrepresented.

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

#114

Post by wtetzner » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

radlad wrote: post #50

Sharlin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What GP wanted was to stash a history of commits, not just the current state of the working tree. `git stash` is fundamentally unable to do that.

That's just called a branch. What GP described was committing all their changes into a single WIP commit.

They were describing many different WIP commits, and then later squashing them to a "proper" commit.

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

#115

Post by TrumpSucks » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #113

numlock86 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already commented on this somewhere else. What's the problem with that? Are you implying female/black programmers are different? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20469963

No, he's implying that they are underrepresented.

Then go write your own blog post. Stop crying.

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

#116

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

Should be interesting to also check if people work during weekends or not, not just the time of day.

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

#117

Post by srfilipek » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #79

kawsper wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what feature or topic branches are for? Commit in your own little world, merge when you are ready to share.

But a lot of teams prefer that you do rebases and have a flat commit history, rather than have merge commits (so your commits would reflect the time of rebase onto master, not the time you first committed to your topic branch). I still think this a very cool back-of-the-envelope estimate though.

> (so your commits would reflect the time of rebase onto master, not the time you first committed to your topic branch)

That's not the case with git. By default it preserves the original commit time.

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

#118

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 4:04 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #112

kragen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about the times of day Git commits were made, not the times of day they were pushed, nor the times of day people used other source-control systems like Perforce. You said, "I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time," citing your own policy of not pushing at night as an example of how "commit time" may not have anything to do with work time. Now you're saying…

I stand by my top comment, avoiding pushes Friday and waiting until Monday often leads to both code commit times on Monday and merge commit times on Monday. (Edit: and BTW I know this for a fact, because we monitored average commit times to make sure the policy was being adhered to.) If you look at the code from the article, you’ll see that the author did not filter out merge commits. The word merge doesn’t even appe…

> You can’t count on commit times to demonstrate anything.

Very extreme stance! Especially for so deep in thread. Sometimes it’s nice to make your ideas more specific as you go deeper in conversation, not just radicalize and double down.

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

#119

Post by vlovich123 » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #83

stinkbug9o wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, exactl…

That to me seems more like a sign that you should be enforcing a policy that pushing the merge button is gated by tests passing (& in successful application pushing the "merge button" should be nothing but a request to automation to apply the merge & do the tests before actually pushing it as a new master). If you're saying that there are breaking changes that are possible that test coverage is insufficient for, I would propose that the test coverage needs to be addressed. Is this advice for small 1 person repos? It can be if you want to develop good habits or be more diligent at preventing defects. It becomes more applicable as more people start contributing.

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

#120

Post by kragen » Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #112

kragen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about the times of day Git commits were made, not the times of day they were pushed, nor the times of day people used other source-control systems like Perforce. You said, "I’d be very cautious about assuming that commit time has anything to do with work time," citing your own policy of not pushing at night as an example of how "commit time" may not have anything to do with work time. Now you're saying…

I stand by my top comment, avoiding pushes Friday and waiting until Monday often leads to both code commit times on Monday and merge commit times on Monday. (Edit: and BTW I know this for a fact, because we monitored average commit times to make sure the policy was being adhered to.) If you look at the code from the article, you’ll see that the author did not filter out merge commits. The word merge doesn’t even appe…

You're attempting to defend the relevance of your comments to an article about the development practices of, among other people, Linus Torvalds, by saying, "Most devs in my experience are not git experts, and they don’t always use git in best practices kinds of ways." Perhaps you are not aware that Linus Torvalds originally wrote Git, and did so specifically to mechanize what he considers to be "best practices".

Edited to add: apparently something in my phrasing is leading you to believe that I'm angry with you and wanting to attack you. I'm not sure what that is, but that isn't my intention. I just think what you're saying isn't true, or rather is presumably true of your company but not of this article, and I was trying to explain why. I'm sorry for writing in what is apparently an aggressive tone.