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A nocturnal animal

Just got off work -- by choice, not by necessity. It's refreshing being the only one at the office, thinking and coding away.

With production starting in full swing, I realize more and more that I work by far the best at night, free of any distractions by others.

Even though I do get slightly tired, in moderation this weariness, quite counterintuitively actually drives me to work harder -- to finish that last line of code, to fix that last bug, to implement that last feature before I call it a night.

The limit for me is when I struggle to keep my eyes open -- when drowsiness progresses to the point where it becomes a concious act to overcome. Coding while sleepy, just like driving, has the potential to lead to terrible accidents: eg, a "quit without saving", a "rm * something" instead of "rm *something" for you fellow UNIX geeks -- I know this from experience. :)

Still, with experience, just like drinking, I've learned to recognize my limits, and within them, I enjoy my nocturnal life.

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Comments (2)

Ohhhh, I SO relate. I once stayed up coding until 1am, desperately, madly trying to find a bug in my code. After coming in the next morning, I found it within 5 minutes of sitting down at my computer. How could I have missed it? I once also INSERTED a bug while trying to debug something, late at night. Stupid.

Oh, and the "rm * something"? I think I once typed "rm -rf *" thinking I was INSIDE a directory I wanted to blow away ... but alas, I was not. Ugh.

I stayed up forever once trying to figure out why subsequent runs of my code didn't produce the same results. I was too sleepy to realize that I forgot to commit ;p

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on August 3, 2004 7:34 PM.

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