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“When the entire household goes to bed, I do curl development for 2 more hours.”
- draw_down 6y agoI use curl a lot so I'm glad it works for him. Having a part-time unpaid moonlighting gig doesn't sound like it would work for me personally.
- reedf1 6y agoI find I can enter a flow state with work more easily when I feel like the world is asleep.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoSame here. It's so relaxing when everyone else is sleeping. All other responsibilities fade away.
- zikzak 6y agoThis is exactly how I feel. That 1.5 - 2 hours each night when I know no one wants or needs me to do anything is invaluable for me mental health. I know I should get more sleep but I need that time to not resent the fact that I get so little time for "me". I get to work at 4:30am (time zone thing) and do a lot of the primary child care and chores. It's often 8:30pm before I'm done and even then the dogs water bugging me to go out, etc. My wife needs sleep so she heads up early and I just putter or stretch, sometimes I write a little code, or watch part of a show. Feels good.
- rektide 6y agoPhilip K Dick wrote about being out of the heat of God's light, not feeling the scorching heat of the palm tree garden upon us. I believe it was from one of the VALIS novels but I haven't gone back to dig it up, and could be wrong. Personally, I find I sometimes have trouble accepting good enough solutions. I want more structure, a better defined start. At night I can drop into a productive flow state with much less resistance, ignore many of the day-time wants. The hours run short; let's seize what we can from the waking hours. As well that "inspiration," I think there is probably a physiological barrier lowering that happens as we go into the night. As we recede from the gods' light, as it were.
- taisalie 6y agoThis is part of why Daylight Saving Time is an actual crime against humanity.
- bradstewart 6y agoSo much this. Specifically (for me), it's the simple understanding that I will not be disturbed for as long as I care to focus, so it's worth the "effort" to get in the zone. Which of course means it only takes 30 seconds to get there. But the screwed up sleep cycles from years and years of this are starting to take their toll, so I've been trying everything I can to replicate that peace of mind during daylight hours. No silver bullet yet.
- ashwoods 6y agoFor a few months my wife had a baking job that required her getting up at 4. I’d get up with her and start to work after breakfast. I’d have the days work before 9:00 standup. More time for sport and cooking. Think it was a healthier lifestyle in total. Social life was impossible though, we couldn’t manage to stay awake long enough to meet up with friends. And impossible to maintain once she switched to another shift.
- anyfoo 6y agoBeing very much not a morning person, I get a taste of that too when I have jet lag traveling west. Even after the feeling of jetlag subsides after a few days, I tend still tend to wake up earlier for two more weeks or so. It's a different world and definitely has advantages. However, like you, I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff of being horribly tired long before my usual bedtime. In total, I think I still prefer getting up late and sleeping late.
- Tade0 6y agoI've found that effective noise-cancelling headphones(e.g. Sony WH1000XM4) help somewhat.
- frollo 6y agoIn my experience they help a lot and that's why people (colleagues, family members, the mailman...) are so busy finding new ways to circumvent them.
- grioghar 6y agoI wonder what the science is behind this. If people are up, I can’t lock in; there’s a constant distraction somewhere in my mind. If I’m the only person awake in the house, I seem to hit flow state with ease.
- elliekelly 6y agoIt’s definitely not science but, for me, time seems to flow more uniformly at night. I have pretty bad ADHD so I big time struggle with “time blindness” - have I been working for 40 minutes or 4 hours? I guess when it’s the middle of the night I don’t really need to worry about how long it’s been. I only need to know that I don’t have to be anywhere else at the moment and my only hard stop is when I can’t keep my eyes open.
- plumsempy 6y agoit has become such a preference for me: silence, dimmed lights, some synthwave music, surrounded by all my machines and a lot of fun.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- enobrev 6y agoMy favorite working hours, of all time, are 11pm-7am. I get more done in that 8-hour stretch than any other. There's less local news. There's nobody to call or text. There are no deliveries. Slack is quiet. My email is quiet. Our repos are quiet. The dev logs are quiet. My family is asleep so I know they're good. If I need a minute to think, I can sit on my front porch and not worry about being distracted. Now that I have a young kid, it's really hard (and generally selfish) to work those hours. I miss it.
- c7DJTLrn 6y agoThe number of @here IM pings I get on company chat during the day is insane, and usually none of them apply to me. Sometimes I have to just secretly schedule work that requires my absolute focus to the night time behind my boss' back. I shouldn't really do that - I don't get paid enough to - but anyway.
- enobrev 6y agoIt might be time to just shut off slack for a few hours a day. It's probably frowned upon in some places, but when I _really_ need to focus (during daytime hours), I generally shut down slack, email, my phone, etc. Generally, the teams I've worked with over the years have been amenable to this. I try to promote it with my teams as well: actual time off (no popping in while on vacation or sick), good sleep, time for focus, shutting off slack - especially when not working. The last thing any of us need is to burn out because of notification overload. It makes us a stronger team if we're all healthy, well-rested, and able to get things done.
- pontifier 6y agoSeriously too many distractions make work impossible. I can't seem to get this into people's heads. I need them to leave me alone when I'm working. It's so bad that I've started to get anxiety every time I open my computer. I start to panic because I know a distraction is coming. It makes it so difficult.
- moosebear847 6y ago
- puddingnomeat 6y agoanyone agreeing with the parent may find earplugs effective for focus in short (4 hour span) periods of work. After 6+ it gets eerily uncomfortable.
- ktpsns 6y agoI also enjoy this special time in the night. It's just 11pm in central europe. But I also know my child goes up tomorrow morning at 7am the latest, and if I keep working until 3 or 4am (which I regularly do), I will have a very bad next day hangover. It's the constant problem with too little time...
- after_care 6y agoAre you concerned about the health or cognitive complications associated with sleep deprivation?
- beforeolives 6y agoNow I just wish that I had a project that I could do this for. Or that I was the kind of person who can keep up this type of work for so many years.
- Avalaxy 6y agoHow about any hobby projects from Kaggle, advent of code or something like that? I find those things very refreshing after my mundane day-job.
- jxramos 6y agoyah if you have the drive I think there's lists of projects open and welcoming to beginners etc. I don't know of any good curated lists but a quick search led to.. * https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/08/03/getting-started-with-contributing-to-open-source/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/08/03/getting-started-with-c... * https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ * https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/ https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/ * https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners
- albntomat0 6y agoI get up an hour or so early on most days to work on a personal project before my normal dev job. I find it's really helped my mental health, especially when work can be a bit frustrating (in entirely normal ways)
- bhaak 6y agoWorking 2 hours a day when nobody is bothering you and you have peace of mind to concentrate is tremendously valuable. Additionally doing that for 23 years, you can get done a lot of work.
- hnrodey 6y agoI've had a few personal projects where I've spent several hours in the evening working to get it off the ground. What I've found is that my mind is so activated/stimulated that I then struggle to even fall asleep as the code is still dancing in my head. It's a real trade-off I have to make - stay up late to begin with to code on something and then another 45-60 mins to even fall asleep.
- globular-toast 6y agoA few times I've had it affect my dreams. I was working on a toy OS a couple of years back. Similar to the OP I would work on it for a couple of hours every night after my girlfriend went home. One time after I was working on virtual memory I had a dream where I was in memory and there pointers and stuff. It was really weird.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoI've definitely had it effect my dreams. But I've also found solutions to bugs by sleeping.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cutemonster 6y agoWas there no invalid pointers and double frees in the dream :-) Maybe waking up was a segfault
- chris_wot 6y agoIt could be worse. Not waking up would be a hard crash.
- cutemonster 6y agoYes, maybe out of memory, accidentally killed process id 1
- annoyingnoob 6y agoI used to do this for my day job. Some of that late night code was pretty bad upon review the next day.
- globular-toast 6y agoI did most of my computer science studies at night when the whole world was asleep. I have quite fond memories of finally finishing a piece of work as the sun was coming up and settling down to sleep at 6am. It was terribly unhealthy, but I learnt so much.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoI guess I'm not sure what's left to do for a couple of hours every day on curl after 23 years (given that it fits into the unix philosophy of do one thing, but do it well)? Are there that many new features? Lots of bugs to fix? (I wouldn't guess so) Seems like it would only need a couple of hours of maintenance/month by now given the functionality.
- zerocrates 6y agoI don't know the details of curl's development, but at least some of it must be just keeping pace with the shifting infrastructure of the internet: HTTP/2/3/QUIC/whatever, changes in TLS and the underlying libraries, that kind of thing.
- touisteur 6y agoThere's always a new version of HTTP around the corner...
- selcuka 6y agoHe answered that in the same tweet thread: > we add features, improvements and bug-fixes continuously. With 240 command line options , 26 transfer protocols and countless combinations of things done over a crazy Internet that's just the nature of it all...
- willcipriano 6y agoCurl supports: "DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Plain, Digest, CRAM-MD5, SCRAM-SHA, NTLM, Negotiate and Kerberos), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and more." I could see creating quality implementations of each of those taking that long. https://curl.se/ https://curl.se/
- UncleOxidant 6y agoMQTT even?
- kissgyorgy 6y agoThis should not encourage anyone to seriously overturn their work-life balance.
- minikites 6y agoHiring practices demand it. Other qualifications being equal, who gets hired: someone who works on personal programming projects or someone who doesn't?
- the_cat_kittles 6y agocURL and VLC, not to mention linux etc... really call into question for me the idea that market forces are necessary or even beneficial to good software. curious to hear what i may be missing by making this inference though.
- r0s 6y agoMaybe the two are related. IT work makes demands of your mind but not your body, so we're all up at night, not tired from a days work. I'd imagine manual laborers sleep much more soundly, and are less likely to code in their down time. (but maybe!)
- jjj1232 6y agoMarket forces do make for optimal software over the long-term, but it’s only optimal as an engine for generating capital. If what you want out of software isn’t aligned with what generates capital you’re not going to be happy. I’m guessing most our our personal metrics for what makes software “good” are only somewhat aligned with capital.
- sorisos 6y agoI think the "hamburger icon"[0] is a good example of conflict between revenue and usability. I wounder if there is more? [0] https://medium.com/@hfuecks/so-we-went-with-a-hamburger-menu-a69a2d24075b https://medium.com/@hfuecks/so-we-went-with-a-hamburger-menu...
- sparrish 6y agoWith 7 kids and working from home, my most productive work hours are after everybody goes to bed. Why waste those precious 'awake' hours on code when I can be enjoying my family?
- alliao 6y agoyeah don't know how you do it, but you be you man. you have my respect.
- artificialLimbs 6y agoHave lots of sex.
- alea_iacta_est 6y ago> With 7 kids ... IMO your comment is even more inspiring than the thread itself :)
- souprock 6y agoWith 12 kids (soon 13) and working from home, I find that there isn't much time when everybody goes to bed. Some wake early, and some stay up late. For me, 7 kids was the point at which I could no longer effectively maintain procps.
- bpodgursky 6y agoAt 13 kids, you could set up a very productive intern program.
- chris_wot 6y agoThere is a joke about killing child processes, but far be it from me to make it.
- kvark 6y agoBeen doing this for years, working on Rust graphics libraries. What helps me sleep is just being totally exhausted. But focus at night is amazing, and motivation is very easy to sustain if the timing is regular. During the day, I keep thinking in the background what I can do in those 2 night hours, so when the time comes there is no procrastination. Feeling very productive this way.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoI wish I had the energy for this. By late evening I'm so tired all I can do is read or watch TV and then go to bed. Perhaps when my daughter is a bit older and I have more spare time I'll be able to do work on hobby projects.
- perplex 6y agoI wake up at 4am everyday to work on a personal project for 2 hours or so. Once the house wakes up I wrap things up. I had to adjust my bedtime to accommodate waking up so early. I'm fairly disciplined about it and never stay awake past 9:30pm. The reason I chose morning instead of evening is I'm pretty tired after work to do anything. And so I get to dedicate my evenings to family time. Edit: typos.
- mssundaram 6y agoThat's so cool. I find it so hard to go to bed on time - how did cultivate discipline to do so?
- cecilpl2 6y agoGetting up at 4am every day is a good start. I do this too, and there's no discipline involved in going to bed - I just get very sleepy around 8 or 9 and want to go to bed.
- anyfoo 6y agoI'm glad it works out for you (I actually mean that), but getting tired at 9:30pm every day would make me unhappy. I really want my free/"me" time do be after everything I have to do is done.
- daniellarusso 6y agoI am leaning towards this, by 9:30p, I am starting to feel very sleepy and I am usually in bed and asleep by 10p. So, 6.5 hours of sleep though? I need either 7 or 9, but 8 does not work for me. So, I would be looking at 5a. Let me ask you, do you immediately start coding, or do you need a few minutes to ‘warm up’? What is the morning ritual, if you don’t mind me asking?
- brutus1213 6y agoHaha .. I thought I was unique in waking up early/feeling asleep early. Guess I have good company. Ritual for me is tip toeing to the basement to avoid waking up the kids and grabbing some caffeine. Biggest challenges are distractions - news, youtube, and hacker news. I need to get better at just focusing on code and not going off on tangents.
- devdiary 6y agoHe's an inspiration. Here's his speech on his learning from open source development for 23 yrs https://youtu.be/oYP7W1gXzsI https://youtu.be/oYP7W1gXzsI
- oldsklgdfth 6y agoI’ve been asking people this question. But first some context. Push-ups are almost universal in fitness tests. They are a solid proxy for strength. Additionally, they are an exercise that is manageable enough that you can do daily and reap significant returns if you do them consistently. What are the push-ups of programming? More specifically for me, c++.
- mattmar96 6y agoI enjoy project euler. Its a series of programming challenges that can be completed in any language you’d like. https://projecteuler.net https://projecteuler.net
- haihaibye 6y agoRun a linter, think about the changes (eg new language feature) then fix the code, and try to write it that way going forward.
- glangdale 6y agoI hate to be one of those guys ("well actually, your question is wrong, because ...") but I spent a lot of time trying to find "C++ pushups" before deciding that I may as well work on interesting projects and try to consciously improve my C++ while doing them. I mean, sure, you can do Project Euler (or many other things), but you can also work on cool projects. I'm writing a superoptimizer (and I have C++ coding stuff at work). For both, I make a conscious effort to try to figure out better ways of doing that stuff (rather than just banging out ancient idiomatic C++ that isn't modern or good) - it's easy to slip into "doing things a dumb but quick way" that doesn't teach you much about the language or coding. I have a similar attitude to push-ups, honestly. I'd rather bench press once a week and do a sport than be constantly banging out push-ups. In both things, you quickly get to the point where you're hitting diminishing returns from the "push-up" type of operation, unless your goal is "to be the best at exercising". If we're comparing someone who couldn't complete 10 pushups or do a basic Project Euler problem with someone who can, I'd say "sure, that first person needs pushups (or programming equivalent)". I'm not sure once you're well beyond that point whether it makes sense to do that many more "pushups", unless you are going to a push-up competition in a month's time.
- RickJWagner 6y agoWow, that's a lot of hours. A sincere 'thank you' for curl.
- brutus1213 6y agoI had a coworker like that. He had 4 kids, stayed late in the office (as did I). When we would meet next day, he'd tell me the stuff he did with the kids before bedtime and some amazing piece of code he wrote or that book on programming he read. I just don't understand it. I live and breath tech but in my 40s, I need a caffeine IV to stay awake past 10pm. I do wake up early (5:30-6) and am totally clear headed then (with the caffeine IV/jk). I just can't do nights anymore. Anyone found a hack?
- artificialLimbs 6y ago40 yo here. I get up at 5 and go into work immediately. Generally try to be in bed by 10ish. I've cut down the caffeine to about half a cup in the a.m., and that seems to help quite a bit with mid/late day energy.
- jcfrei 6y agoMaybe try a biphasic sleep pattern. It's just a fancy way of recommending an afternoon nap but it might really help you stay energetic for the second half of the day.
- CGamesPlay 6y agoThere's nothing wrong with getting 8 hours of sleep / night! I'm not 40 yet but I learned early on that I need sleep or I can't function. The actual time of day shifts around over the years, but getting 8 hours is important for me.
- Rantenki 6y agoSLXKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ Every time I read about one of these projects, I am at once SUPER THANKFUL for the time that this person puts in, to improve a project that I depend upon daily, but also somewhat incensed that there are thousands of large corporations that have a dependency on this stuff that they aren't giving back any support for. link rel: https://curl.se/donation.html https://curl.se/donation.html I am not a Curl contributor, or related to the project, but I do donate.
- BeetleB 6y ago> but also somewhat incensed that there are thousands of large corporations that have a dependency on this stuff that they aren't giving back any support for. Usually, this is due to decisions the author made, and the author is in full control of changing the situation. I come from a society where it's normal for people to give stuff with no strings attached, and then later claim I have a moral obligation to pay back for all the benefits I received. It sucked being in that society.
- jimhi 6y agoYour vagueness makes this society sound really ominous. What society are you talking about? Scientology? China?
- Rantenki 6y agoReally honestly shocked that I got down-voted on this. Is it really not cool to wish that developers would get compensated for their time if their work is valuable? I understand that the developer chose the license and distribution model, but if they hadn't chosen this model, then the community would have settled on whatever the best solution was that was permissive enough that they didn't have to pay for it. Passion projects in OS are a race to the bottom compensation-wise, due to dynamics outside of the control of the developers building them.
- minikites 6y agoImagine what society would look like if we had a basic income and someone like this could work on projects like that without having to worry about the commercial implications of their work. There's no reason we can't live that way now except that we choose not to. We find it preferable to live in a society where a handful of people can accumulate billions of dollars. Dollars which have been extracted from the labor of others and influenced by the duress of losing food and shelter.
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y agohow many people dream it is to work 23 years on a shell utility? Just the warm up to my builds take 2 hours :(
- keithnz 6y agoI've quite enjoyed watching him on twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/curlhacker https://www.twitch.tv/curlhacker
- ryanSrich 6y agoI have a similar schedule for a portion of my work. I find that I have 2 really good productive hours right before bed. I also find 3pm-5pm to be extremely unproductive for me. So my schedule is usually 7am-10am work, 10am-12pm exercise, 12pm-3pm work, 3pm-7pm dinner/family time, 8pm-10pm work. This type of schedule feels very liberating to me. I don’t feel like I’m working that much, but when you add it up it’s quite a few productive hours in a day.
- danielscrubs 6y agoI’ve met the creator once at a hackathon. What was striking was just how happy and energetic he seemed to be. Really nice guy. That he spends so much time in front of the computer is quite a shock for me. Because when I do it I become a nervous wreck when doing hobby projects, always looking for “more programming time” (like an addict), and without energy for anything else. So even though I like coding a lot, I just become the opposite: unenergetic and not that happy. He has solved the puzzle somehow, it’s impressive.
- fsociety 6y agoIt sounds like he timeboxes his work fairly well. I’ve started to do this and it helps the mind know when to turn on and shut off.
- sz4kerto 6y agoObviously this is very personal, but - not working in the last few hours before going to sleep improved the quality of my sleep - going to sleep together with my partner improved our relationship a lot (I'm not talking about sex life, just actually synchronizing the time of going to bed)
- RHSman2 6y agoI did my own startup (solo) and worked from home. 2 kids and wife. Spent time with them in the morning, school run, start work, good lunch and dog walk. Afternoon work and then school run and evening with them. Come 9pm through 2am a beautiful, undisturbed coding period. Super effective for getting it off the ground and knuckling down. This however was not sustainable due to it all getting too much and sleep deprived. Over 2 years of sub 6 hrs I started to get palpitations and fully burnt out and a week of weird fever brought me back but I couldn’t do that again.
- mcbuilder 6y agoI did this for years, often more than 2 hours. With young kids, I was burning the candle at both ends. I'd feel like I was giving up parts of my career if I didn't. My colleagues would look at me and say I looked like I was crushing it, but I could only think of all the things falling through the cracks. I've pulled back, holding onto the job. I am now trying to fix my mental health, so many things pushed under the rug. You know what, I'm happy to have a family and be able to support them. I think that's what I wanted in the first place. It wasn't worth pushing beyond my limits. I am still looking for new career opportunities, but I'll have to be more selective, not simply pushing myself until I break.
- rendall 6y agoI have found that a good work-life balance - literally, taking vacation, turning off the computer at night, not checking or answering work emails on the weekend, taking time off work to pick up the kid from daycare or to the doctor, having barbecue or bar crawls with friends - actually makes me a much better developer. Spare time spent alone I often work on personal coding projects, but I'm always willing to shut down the computer and play train tracks or wrestle
- rendall 6y agoAfter working for over a decade in companies and industries that pride themselves on being always-on and constantly working, I can see the difference, and I can attest, it is always, always robbing Peter to pay Paul.
- nicbou 6y agoI found that doing this had no negative effect on my career. I still got glowing reviews and never had an issue finding work. I think we generally earn enough not to sell the best years our lives for an extra 20%. I don't think I'll lie on my death bed and wish I spent more time at the office. Hell, I wish I earned less and spent more time elsewhere.
- tomcooks 6y agoI used to wake up at 0500 to workout and language training, then do programming until 0800, grab my bike and go work in a warehouse till 1700 and do some more programming till 2000. Late night work is nice but it tends to overflow as you get "in the zone", and rob you of sleep hours you need to recover.
- harel 6y agoI've been that for as far as i can remember. I am happiest waking up after 5-6 hours of sleep so it fits my sleep cycle perfectly. There is a different kind of silence at 1am.
- alpanka 6y agoSo what does your wife thinks of this?? I assume she is not happy going to bed alone every night for 23 ??
- effnorwood 6y agoExcellent biceps
- cafard 6y agoWell, I'm grateful.