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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?

#201

Post by darkmighty »

simplify wrote: post #158
anaphor wrote: post #27

From John Carmack: > I often worked nights and slept during the day, but I almost always got 8 hours of sleep. There are still 112 hours left in the week! https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932718658366857216

Happy to see this being pointed out. Sleep is the single most important factor in code quality & correctness https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1119709859979714560

Sleep is a very technical thing, it's a 'Brain maintenance time'. It's not about saving energy or anything that could/should be bypassed (otherwise we'd be tired awake at night, useful for defending against predators in the wilderness -- nature accepts a great cost for this shutdown). I find my memory improved significantly once I started being more careful with my sleep, for instance. I wish I had come into contact with this instead of the bragging 'I barely need any sleep!' culture.

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

#202

Post by IloveHN84 »

I always code between 8 and 16 o'clock, sometimes until 17, but then stop.

Programmers and engineers have family and hobbies too.

Stop making the myth of the endurance programmer more and more inflated. It's proven and true that shorter working Hours have major bursts of productivity against longer ones.

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

#203

Post by numlock86 »

dewey wrote: post #149
numlock86 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why does it matter? Underrepresented? Who is? The people that are not different but yet are different? I don't get it. I see a couple of people with their commit times being analyzed. If there were black and/or females in that list, great. I did not waste a single thought about it and wouldn't have even if there were some or many in it. Why would I? It's just some people. Forcing a quota on certain "types of peo…

I'm not the person making the original argument but I agree that they have a point. Someone creates a list of "famous programmers" which only includes whites males. This just further cements the image of programmers being white males, when in reality the field is more diverse and when it isn't people are trying to make it a bit more diverse through various angles (mentoring, removing biases from hiring, etc). I'm not…

> That is called privilege and means you are not affected by it and you just don't see the problem.

What privilege? What problem exactly? And elaborate why it is a problem.

> But maybe in the future if _you, me or someone other white male_ [...] look outside of the bubble we are living in [...]

I don't see myself in that list. Neither I know what bubble you are talking about. Please elaborate.

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

#204

Post by michaelg7x »

anaphor wrote: post #27

From John Carmack: > I often worked nights and slept during the day, but I almost always got 8 hours of sleep. There are still 112 hours left in the week! https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932718658366857216

Full disclosure: I am definitely not famous, but might be considered a programmer.

I found that when hacking for a several months on a solo prototype project, my hours drifted later and later so that I ended up going to bed around 4 a.m., and rising at 11. It's really hard to correct! In terms of productivity, though, the wee small hours are hard to beat.

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

#205

Post by lolc »

dahart wrote: post #167
haykmartiros wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what is worth kragan is entirely right here.

As strawman arguments often are within their own context. That doesn't mean I'm wrong. My point that merge commits were included in the OP's article and data went unanswered by @kragen, and it's directly relevant to what I said at the top; merge commits don't represent work time, but they're being counted here. Code commits also don't necessarily represent work time either, due to squashing, stashing, and general dev…

Merging is work too. The times of merges are indicators that the person did work at that time.

Obviously the methodology is limited but it does seem to work well in practice. If you have evidence that the statistics are wrong for one of the listed programmers, please do share it.

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

#206

Post by lolc »

lucb1e wrote: post #173
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 never saw anyone do this. May I ask what the point is? If it's just going to be in your local version and you later have to do (a very small amount of) work to get it back into one commit, why bother committing random stuff intermediately at all?

I mainly use the staging area for this. Not yet create a commit, but get the diffs out of the way.

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

#207

Post by JCharante »

wyldfire wrote: post #55

To those asking about whether time zones are considered, the author responded in [1]: > The script uses the time the author saw on his wall clock when doing the commit. I can't imagine better time to use for such graphs [1] https://gist.github.com/bessarabov/674ea13c77fc8128f24b5e3f5...

What does wall clock mean? How do they know the geographic position of the authors at their time of commit? I have my laptop's time set to my SO's because if I want to know my current timezone I can just look down at my watch.

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

#208

Post by hinkley »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #75
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?

It always surprises me that workplaces with automatic deployment don’t have deploy windows. Automatic deployment only occurs 10-3 in your region and you can deploy by overriding outside that time to get out emergency fixes.

Most CI systems support running builds automatically on an interval, and I think some support time ranges as well.

In a way a lot of this CI/CD stuff was easier when you ran it on your CI system.

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

#209

Post by hinkley »

inlined wrote: post #82
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

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.

Stalking other workers at high granularity is sometimes the only way I have to figure out what was going through their head (or indeed, my head 2 years ago) when they wrote this... very interesting logic.

The biggest WTF programmer I work with squashes all of his commits. So every commit is 100-400 lines of Rube Goldbergian majesty.

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

#210

Post by jki275 »

michaelg7x wrote: post #204
anaphor wrote: post #27

From John Carmack: > I often worked nights and slept during the day, but I almost always got 8 hours of sleep. There are still 112 hours left in the week! https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/932718658366857216

Full disclosure: I am definitely not famous, but might be considered a programmer. I found that when hacking for a several months on a solo prototype project, my hours drifted later and later so that I ended up going to bed around 4 a.m., and rising at 11. It's really hard to correct! In terms of productivity, though, the wee small hours are hard to beat.

I'm also certainly not famous -- but I've found the same for myself. I'm far more productive between midnight and 4 or so than any other time of the day. Very hard to make those hours work with a family though.
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