41–50 of 78 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the same boat. I sit down and take hour-long showers to think through anything important. I will probably build a sauna at my next house.
My sauna is my absolute favorite place to think through anything complex or difficult. Careful not to burn yourself if you take a whiteboard in there!
Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics that were easy to optimize (bugs closed, LOC written, code coverage numbers) instead of looking at some elusive "big picture". We recognize these typically aren't good performance metrics. The same people would agonize over the type of keyboard switches and vim configurations and boast that they can write more code faster.
Allow me to counterpoint. Every creative engineering profession needs interacting (not just 'talking and listening', but also observing and even acting into the user domain to understand and feel the needs and opportunities). Every solution design needs modeling and thinking and sometimes things benefit from being written down in other forms than code (even though code that is written to be understood can be infinite…
Well put. I agree this is the reality, fantasies aside. No doubt many of us have very productive and effective careers without much leaving the desk. But I like to think that there is fertile ground beyond our natural habitat too, and some of us (like myself) need the encouragement to explore it. At the end of the day though, we'll still need to return to our desk habitat and deliver what we set out to.
I tend to do a lot of my problem solving laying awake in bed at night. Either I can't sleep or I wake up in the small hours of the night, and I'll chew on some problem that's been bugging me until I solve it and go back to sleep. This was part of what made me want to start my own company. I'm not doing my best work until I'm so immersed in a project that my brain's working on it round the clock in the background, and…
Walking home from work helped a lot with that and also with signing off at the end of the day.
I always have my best ideas while I shower lmao
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
This text succinctly summarizes what I struggled to express to some of my colleagues. It doesn't offer a solution but it neatly highlights the problem. A lot of attention is being paid to things like keyboards, mice, software used to write code and I never understood that fetish. These are just tools, tools aren't the job. Pretty much every dev I know has a history with or knows of a manager who optimized metrics tha…
I agree. I know people that spend hundreds on keyboards, for example. I also think the debates about vim vs IDEs falls into this same category. It's just a tool. I really don't type all that much as a percentage of my work day.
I know it's "just a tool", but I can't help but feel a connection to it, like people often feel for their vehicle. I think back to the things I built with it the same way one might reminisce about that one great road trip. Keyboards are the bridge between the physical and virtual realms. I understand the desire to have one that's truly your own.
> But how much attention do we pay to the ergonomics of thinking?
A lot actually. See how much effort people are willing to put to org-mode for example, and I'd say that is like 90% thinking ergonomics