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How high up there is this on your list of things that you would like to be doing today? I'm guessing it's not very high. It would be pretty low on my list.
Start fiddling with ChatGPT and get it to convert it for you.
You're bored, not brain dead.
I have an advice: walk daily as much as you can, but no more than two hours, ruminating what is bothering and/or factinates you in your work. Thinking around the exercise time can be very helpful. And walking allows you to think while doing some exercise, which is even more benefitial.
More than two hours of walking may result in more than 12 km of walk, which can be taxing. 5-6 km of walk is OK.
Personally, I also do resistance training and intermittent fasting, but my primary tool is walking and was for a long time.
Right now I am closing the bug that was introduced more than 10 years ago into the system I work with. I have more than four thousands of lines in changeset in more than four hundreds of files, in two unrelated repositories. So I think I am not all that bad at figuring things out.
PS And sleep well! ;)
Sounds like you've identified your problem with the task - you can't hold the entire state of the problem in your head all at once, but maybe you would have been able to in the past. This seems like something you can overcome. Have you tried writing these function calls out as a flow on a piece of paper, or in a flow chart, document, something like that? A reference which you draw to be able to tell where you are the…
"It’s probably just that aging changes your mode of thinking. Right now, I have to really concentrate and I might even get a headache just trying to imagine something clearly and distinctly with twenty or thirty components. When I was young, I could imagine a castle with twenty rooms with each room having ten different objects in it. I would have no problem. I can’t do that anymore. Now I think more in terms of earlier experiences. I see a network of inchoate clouds, instead of the picture-postcard clearness. But I do write better programs."[0]
I can believe the part about better programs. Can you imagine working with somebody who can clearly visualize software with 200 sub-components in it? I once worked with software written by someone who had similar powers. He was a hardware designer. His software had very little organization; he wrote imperatively and remembered where everything was. Six months after he handed a program off to me, I spoke with him and told him I was currently trying to figure out where a particular component was initialized, and he told me exactly where, in what part of what file. IIRC, some hardware registers were being initialized in a procedure that was allocating working space for a numerical part of the program, because that's here he happened to open the log file for the first time, and he wanted the logging from the hardware registers to be the first thing in the log file, before he logged the fact that the memory had been allocated successfully. He remembered this with no hesitation, more than six months after he last touched the code, possibly two years after he made the decision to initialize the hardware in that spot.
Someone with less mental horsepower, like me, has to organize their code into modules with clear names and responsibilities.
[0] https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-...
Maybe I’m making myself subconciously incapable of doing it.
1. You're getting old. Start writing everything down on paper. 2. Some people decline mentally faster then others, sometimes in their 40-50. Don't freak out, but do pay attention, ask others you know to pay attention to you. 3. Take it one layer at a time, and again, write everything down, best on paper. And keep smiling when it is hard.
For me it works wonders. Wish I started it when I was 17.
I've experienced this periodically since my early 20's - generally in hindsight I realise it was: real life getting in the way, burnout, lack of interest (I was interested in the idea, but on some fundamental level - not the activity) - also occasionally just a feeling of Groundhog Day (ie. Some code tasks can just feel a little too familiar - even if novel, and that saps my joy) Either way, at the time it was quite…
Thank you. Good advice about hacking on some personal projects/experiments. I'm worried that wont rebuild my confidence and abilities fast enough though. I want to make progress on this task today, not next week. Other developers seem to be succeeding, and I'm worried about how I'll look if it takes me weeks do to what others are doing in hours. (This isn't meant to dismiss your advice, to but to give feedback and so…
"even more advice": Issue is likely mental focus (since you have a finite daily mental, emotional stress budget)
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/breaking-the-chains-finding...
- (let go of) mental re(re)view. "This too shall pass".
+ (embrace) "just do it" && "Don't worry, be happy".
! (remember) chemical dependencies, if any, must be brought under control.
Sounds like you've identified your problem with the task - you can't hold the entire state of the problem in your head all at once, but maybe you would have been able to in the past. This seems like something you can overcome. Have you tried writing these function calls out as a flow on a piece of paper, or in a flow chart, document, something like that? A reference which you draw to be able to tell where you are the…