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I’ve noticed that I have a lot less trouble with interruptions deeper in my career than starting out because those mental models are refined and intuitive now.

I’ve noticed that I have a lot less trouble with interruptions deeper in my career than starting out because those mental models are refined and intuitive now. The example presented in the article where the programmer has a carefully constructed recreation of a null reference bug could probably be broken up into a series of steps that don’t require keeping as many variables in your head. I agree that interruptions are annoying but they’re unavoidable, and we can develop strategies to make them less impactful. Passive aggressively trying to make somebody else feel your pain is guaranteed not to work and will just make them resentful and make you look petty.

lordnacho 5y ago
I agree it's silly to hit back at people. As for managing the interruptions, I tend to think of it that a deep session needs maybe 3 hours from one end of the pool to the other. Break it and you might need to start over, depends on how checkpointy you can make it, so try to make a way to not get interrupted for that length of time. That's a real senior coder skill BTW, making your own exploration recoverable. You already mentioned one thing you can do, which is to not try the really long crossings.
davidivadavid 5y ago
That's one of my pet peeves in this (recurring) discussion. If you're a programmer, and you're telling me that every time you work you have to reconstruct the state of a system so large you can barely hold it in your head, maybe you should invest in learning about modularity, abstraction, or just... taking notes?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The luxury of being able to design every system you work on isn't shared by many. Being able to hold the details of a complex process is one of the key traits that will allow you to succeed with legacy codebases or difficult languages. You can try to refactor everything into a perfect state but business isn't going to wait.

lordnacho 5y ago

I agree it's silly to hit back at people. As for managing the interruptions, I tend to think of it that a deep session needs maybe 3 hours from one end of the pool to the other. Break it and you might need to start over, depends on how checkpointy you can make it, so try to make a way to not get interrupted for that length of time. That's a real senior coder skill BTW, making your own exploration recoverable. You already mentioned one thing you can do, which is to not try the really long crossings.

davidivadavid 5y ago

That's one of my pet peeves in this (recurring) discussion. If you're a programmer, and you're telling me that every time you work you have to reconstruct the state of a system so large you can barely hold it in your head, maybe you should invest in learning about modularity, abstraction, or just... taking notes?

ipaddr 5y ago
The luxury of being able to design every system you work on isn't shared by many. Being able to hold the details of a complex process is one of the key traits that will allow you to succeed with legacy codebases or difficult languages. You can try to refactor everything into a perfect state but business isn't going to wait.