3 ms·

I have taught myself to not feel bad about "off days". Rather than 5 days on, 2 days off like structured employment, if I "go with the flow" my body/mind/voice

I have taught myself to not feel bad about "off days". Rather than 5 days on, 2 days off like structured employment, if I "go with the flow" my body/mind/voice might demand after say 15 days on, maybe 3-5 days off. I'll grant that. As soon as recharged, whatever down-time/"off" stuff I was into becomes boring and the work where I left off lures me back in. But you'll have to allow such off time. Having one right now, hence I'm posting here. As for "procrastination" through "work-days", I don't do that much, maybe an hour of "random rubbish" a day tops. Grabbing lunch is a nice short break; eating it, another; 10 minutes of weights, another; showering, (h)eating dinner, filling/emptying dishwasher.. it all adds up to just the right amount & length of brief brain breaks "aerating" the work day/routine. The feeling that's worse than any sort of misguided guilt about off time is when you did power through some 12-15 hours and reflect back on & summarize what exactly one has managed to produce net --- it often feels like disturbingly little for the time, given all the high-level tooling, frameworks, helper libs and the fast hardware & internet we all enjoy today.

abalashov 9y ago
The feeling that's worse than any sort of misguided guilt about off time is when you did power through some 12-15 hours and reflect back on & summarize what exactly one has managed to produce net --- it often feels like disturbingly little for the time Definitely. Especially when coming by 12-15 hours is incredibly difficult, for any number of reasons. I often come away with the feeling that for having run this kind of marathon—and that's what it feels like nowadays—I should have managed like a week's worth of work, especially considering, as you say, all the perceived efficiency gains. But modern high-level tooling and frameworks have their drawbacks, too. One spends an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to do things "the frameworky way". I understand the upsides, of course, but it has still led to a profound frustration with the modern-day practice of programming. Back when I wrote C, I may have had to write 10x as much code, but at least I was churning out lines of code perceptibly. With a small standard library, there wasn't that much to stop and look up. It was an exercise full of "creative flow". Nowadays, I have 27 browser tabs and 5 API references open any time I need to actually do anything, and that in itself can be a major psychological blocker.
- dualogy 9y ago
  Yes I usually try to stick to the current language's standard library as much as possible --- and then for DB or other interop/protocols not already in there, there's typically the canonical mature library or binding in place. Other stuff where libs/modules may exist, I often prefer attacking the small sub-set actually required myself manually. This may not always work out and one cannot always be sure beforehand how well it'll work out, but especially for the things where you only need 10% of the actual functionality and some framework's/lib's focus is mostly on "the other 90%" (in terms of perf / stability / bug-free-ness), on balance I end up with "more LoC written & to maintain but less time spent now and going forward". This approach can definitely fall flat on its face occasionally when just by writing the 10% you thought you needed, you only at the end slowly realize the rest will need to be pulled in after all. That blows. Not a very common occurrence imho tho

abalashov 9y ago

The feeling that's worse than any sort of misguided guilt about off time is when you did power through some 12-15 hours and reflect back on & summarize what exactly one has managed to produce net --- it often feels like disturbingly little for the time Definitely. Especially when coming by 12-15 hours is incredibly difficult, for any number of reasons. I often come away with the feeling that for having run this kind of marathon—and that's what it feels like nowadays—I should have managed like a week's worth of work, especially considering, as you say, all the perceived efficiency gains. But modern high-level tooling and frameworks have their drawbacks, too. One spends an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to do things "the frameworky way". I understand the upsides, of course, but it has still led to a profound frustration with the modern-day practice of programming. Back when I wrote C, I may have had to write 10x as much code, but at least I was churning out lines of code perceptibly. With a small standard library, there wasn't that much to stop and look up. It was an exercise full of "creative flow". Nowadays, I have 27 browser tabs and 5 API references open any time I need to actually do anything, and that in itself can be a major psychological blocker.

dualogy 9y ago
Yes I usually try to stick to the current language's standard library as much as possible --- and then for DB or other interop/protocols not already in there, there's typically the canonical mature library or binding in place. Other stuff where libs/modules may exist, I often prefer attacking the small sub-set actually required myself manually. This may not always work out and one cannot always be sure beforehand how well it'll work out, but especially for the things where you only need 10% of the actual functionality and some framework's/lib's focus is mostly on "the other 90%" (in terms of perf / stability / bug-free-ness), on balance I end up with "more LoC written & to maintain but less time spent now and going forward". This approach can definitely fall flat on its face occasionally when just by writing the 10% you thought you needed, you only at the end slowly realize the rest will need to be pulled in after all. That blows. Not a very common occurrence imho tho