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The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-Lapse
- cfj 13y agoTotal window switches: 32768 How very neat and appropriate for a programmer.
- lennel 13y agosounds like the upper bound of a data type to me.
- cfj 13y agoVery possible.
- xentronium 13y agoWould be one less.
- theorique 13y agoNo, it is 1-indexed :)
- nwinter 13y agoJust coincidence, actually.
- code_scrapping 13y agoIt seems like an interesting experiment, but I disagree with the conclusions of "I was getting better, I was happy". This is not sustainable and by all psychological/physical measurements this should be very bad for the person. Can we kill the Cult of the Workaholic already?
- lennel 13y agoI agree. I hope once the haze has settled he has to maintain this code.
- serickson 13y agoHe will. And I will. I've worked with him for years and while our code is not the best code, we do strive to make it maintainable. Especially for a large project like this that we'd like to build a community of coders around.
- code_scrapping 13y agoDon't take this the wrong way - nobody means any disrespect your work, but I'm skeptical (to say the least) about this being a sustainable tempo of work. So, if you are pulling it off, can you give a comment on how long have you been working like this, and whether there's an simple trade-off in terms of restfulness, social life, etc... You know, can you live like this, and for how long.
- rimo 13y ago> viking metal is stronger than sleep Yes.
- colinbartlett 13y agoWhat a horrible idea.
- applecore 13y agoWhy?
- camperman 13y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one who still switches across to Quake and Nethack to clear the mind for a few minutes.
- cliffcrosland 13y agoThose are screensavers, actually. Looks like he did almost nothing but code last week during his waking hours.
- gsaines 13y agoYeah, I helped him choose those screensavers, he basically wanted some video to show while he was sleeping, that way the timelapse could be continuous. I was especially pleased with the bus driver bit.
- awjr 13y ago"Normally, I work a focused-but-relaxed 60 hours in a week." Ouch, not sure I could cope with that.
- lincolnq 13y agoYes, most people aren't Nick Winter, and shouldn't be doing 60 hours a week. He is a self-improvement machine. His ebook "The Motivation Hacker", which I highly recommend, explains how he does it. http://www.nickwinter.net/the-motivation-hacker http://www.nickwinter.net/the-motivation-hacker
- chris_wot 13y agoI'm sure the bug count was ridiculously high.
- serickson 13y agoYes, but because so much was getting shifted around and refactored and added. I don't think any more bugs were introduced than if he'd done the work over a two or three week period. He spent a good portion of that week refactoring a particularly old and central piece of code, and he spent the better part of the weekend fixing bugs both old and new. So overall I believe we're ahead.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- GrinningFool 13y agoDiscussions around the merits of a 120 hour work week aside, this video was a pretty cool thing. Though I do notice that the author spends most of his time looking up and left. As someone with neck troubles, I suggest rearranging the layout so that most time is spent looking straight ahead, with head mostly level - before you develop the same kinds of troubles.
- nwinter 13y agoThanks for the tip. I actually just got a second monitor (third screen) but wasn't able to time-lapse it, so for this week I was unbalanced mostly looking at just one of the screens. I shall now rearrange my gaze targets.
- yamaneko 13y agoI think the main conclusion of this experiment is not to be workaholic, but rather coding for fun and forgetting about deadlines. When I am coding and my mind do a context change to think about my unpaid bills or an approaching deadline, it severely decreases my focus.
- disdev 13y agoObviously that's not sustainable... but even the 60 hour version sounds pretty rough to me. Without a wife and kids, maybe. But I think if I tried this I wouldn't have to worry about a wife and kids anymore. Am I the only one who works better and more efficiently when I have a little bit of a break in between?
- Qantourisc 13y agoBe careful, this is a great way to get a burnout !
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- captn3m0 13y agoDoes anyone know what the graph is at the bottom right?
- cliffcrosland 13y agoThis is the graph: http://www.nickwinter.net/codecombat-stats http://www.nickwinter.net/codecombat-stats. It is a percentile feedback work graph, indicating what fraction of the day so far you have been working on something productive, if I'm not mistaken.
- kiskis 13y agoI think this is cool and in my opinion has nothing to do with the workaholic culture. I never did a deliberate 120 week, but I can attest that when I constantly do >12 hour days for a limited(!!) period my focus was much better. While there may be a cognitive decline because of the hours I believe there is a positive counterbalance when you do not need to worry about food, emails, laundry or any mundane tasks and basically you never unload the problem from your head. For certain type of coding tasks that gives much more than what is removed because of the tiredness. This is something like an ironman. You can do it a few times, it puts you into a zen state, but obviously you don't run an ironman every day or every week of your life.
- JayEnn 13y agoOh dear. This is going to be used as a stick to beat developers who work their contracted hours.
- nviennot 13y agohaha this is awesome :)
- anantmendiratta 13y agonow this was an epic post. couldn't imagine this. i am not sure that somebody can cope this that.
- eloff 13y agoThis makes me nostalgic for my single days. When I could code without interruption for long periods of time. But I'm happier now and have a better work/life balance. I'd swear that makes me more productive.
- michaelmior 13y agoWhile watching this, I started wondering how much of the code base you could OCR from the video.
- alexrson 13y agoInteresting question. I guess it all depends on how much he jumps around between files and different parts of files. There's a scene in Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson which is similar to this problem. The protagonist is in jail with a laptop which has the location of treasure on it encrypted by a WWII Enigma machine. However, the bad guys can see his screen at all times, so he needs to write the code to crack the cipher without looking at the data. I won't spoil how he does it because I recommend reading the book.
- michaelmior 13y agoThanks for the book recommendation :)
- serickson 13y agoWe're planning on open sourcing the whole site in the future anyway, so you'll be able to get your hands on it directly soon enough!
- michaelmior 13y agoAwesome! Glad to hear it :)
- vijayr 13y agoThose desks from ergo depot he mentions in the article, look awesome, but quite pricey. Anyone know where to get a cheap one?
- alexrson 13y agoIt's actually cheaper to have two desks, two monitors, two keyboards and mice. Especially if you already extra gear lying around. I have this setup at work and find it faster/easier than an adjustable desk.
- dudus 13y agoI would be interested to know how you recorded this. Including the stats.
- nwinter 13y agoHere's the code: https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger I initially wrote it as an self-tracking activity logger with no interface, but when I went to do the time-lapse video, I added the HUD UI and made it save screenshots at regular intervals. The HUD is actually showing on my screen at all times, so it gets included in the screenshots. From those screenshots, I just used ffmpeg to compile a video. I haven't written this for anyone else to run it, but if you're running Mavericks, you could try! You'd probably want to cut out some of the stuff, like the part that shows the work graphs from my website. The stats get recorded by all of the TPTracker*.m code. For keystrokes and mouse movements, you just ask to get notified of all system events (the user has to enable assistive access for Telepath). For window switches, light levels, and webcam, you have to poll. GitHub, Trello, and Gmail are polling web APIs, reading the API keys from stupid config files in Dropbox. For tracking how many builds I've done, I wrote a hacky brunch plugin: https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-brunch https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-brunch . Current music comes from iTunes/Spotify distributed notifications, simple. Work hours and happiness/energy/health come from distributed notifications sent out by a Python script that parses my Emacs org mode files where I record these things whenever I save those files with Emacs after-save-hooks. So those would be unusable unless you were to modify the code to get some other way of doing happiness and mood. Same with the rightmost section: a web view showing the percentile feedback work graph from my website is not easily transferrable.
- borplk 13y agoI work 40 hours a week and I already think that's too much.
- brianwawok 13y agoThis would be really fun to do for a project I was really into. My only changes would be: a) A week off afterwards without touching a computer to get sane again b) An hour a day for exercise, because I would not be willing to let my health go that bad. Sitting 120 hours isn't good, but at least a little exercise would raise my sanity/health a little
- nwinter 13y agoI used an adjustable-height standing/sitting desk, so I was standing maybe 40% of the time. I agree, I can't imagine doing it seated the whole time.