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The Crunch Mode Paradox: Turning Superstars Average

5 points by pius 19y ago

iamwil 19y ago
I found myself in a self-imposed crunch mode this weekend. I had a preconceived notion in my mind how much I was going to be able to accomplish this weekend, and when my estimates were far off (what was estimated to be 6 hours of work were actually 18), I got impatient, thinking that I SHOULD have finished hours ago. I ended up not doing things the right way, and merely plowed ahead, until I got it to work. However, after the relief of finally getting it done, I have to go back and spend some time refactoring and cleaning up the mess that I made. I often have to remind myself that good engineering simply takes time, and will save in the long run.
DanielBMarkham 19y ago
It's interesting. When I'm in crunch mode, I'm not thinking about features at all. I'm just doing the same thing as I did before, only without so much goofing off (reading email, drinking, eating, etc) I separate that from "hacking" which I picture as taking a machete and flailing away at the code until it submits, no matter what state it is in. I have been known to hack with the best of 'em, but only for short periods, usually the last few hours around a drop. But usually I'm always thinking of the structure of the code as I code, continuing the work I did with modeling (if I did any) as I think through what is important, what goes where, what are the important nouns and verbs of my intermediate language. I drop back out of design mode to pick up various pieces of functionality, then continue the work. I'm usually looking for the biggest headache first -- might as well suffer now rather than later. Usually the biggest headaches are the ones that have greatest impact on whether your strategies are correct or not -- whether caching that huge list is going to work real-time or whether a distributed linked-list is going to work. But then I always end up spending the same amount of time on such vexing stuff as "How did I get that box blue, anyway?" or "why is that off by one pixel?" or something like that. Gee, I love programming.

5 points by pius 19y ago

I found myself in a self-imposed crunch mode this weekend. I had a preconceived notion in my mind how much I was going to be able to accomplish this weekend, and when my estimates were far off (what was estimated to be 6 hours of work were actually 18), I got impatient, thinking that I SHOULD have finished hours ago. I ended up not doing things the right way, and merely plowed ahead, until I got it to work. However, after the relief of finally getting it done, I have to go back and spend some time refactoring and cleaning up the mess that I made. I often have to remind myself that good engineering simply takes time, and will save in the long run.

DanielBMarkham 19y ago

It's interesting. When I'm in crunch mode, I'm not thinking about features at all. I'm just doing the same thing as I did before, only without so much goofing off (reading email, drinking, eating, etc) I separate that from "hacking" which I picture as taking a machete and flailing away at the code until it submits, no matter what state it is in. I have been known to hack with the best of 'em, but only for short periods, usually the last few hours around a drop. But usually I'm always thinking of the structure of the code as I code, continuing the work I did with modeling (if I did any) as I think through what is important, what goes where, what are the important nouns and verbs of my intermediate language. I drop back out of design mode to pick up various pieces of functionality, then continue the work. I'm usually looking for the biggest headache first -- might as well suffer now rather than later. Usually the biggest headaches are the ones that have greatest impact on whether your strategies are correct or not -- whether caching that huge list is going to work real-time or whether a distributed linked-list is going to work. But then I always end up spending the same amount of time on such vexing stuff as "How did I get that box blue, anyway?" or "why is that off by one pixel?" or something like that. Gee, I love programming.