When I can get in the zone, programming gives me the same feeling as playing a game like Factorio or Civilization. My thoughts get faster and faster, I lose complete track of time, and sometimes even leave my body.
When I finally stop my brain is going a thousand miles an hour and no matter how late it is I won’t be able to get to sleep for a couple hours.
It’s beautiful and terrible and exactly why I have the job I do.
I once collaborated with an exceptionally talented programmer who seemed so engrossed in his addiction that he would invent challenges where there were none, presumably to make his work more engaging and bearable. However, this often led to incomplete projects because once the stimulating aspects were finished, he struggled to find the motivation to continue. Clearly, this behavior was extreme and detrimental.
I think a lot of devs can relate to that
My brain goblins love refactoring. I love taking a rusty pile of shit and making it shine. I want to polish something old, or build something completely new. Adding features to existing code is the part I hate.
Yesssssss. I just got done splitting up a 3000-line mess of React code into a handful of simple, reusable components. Better than sex.
My brain goblin is a big fan of performance. Recently I reviewed a teammate’s code. It was a small 100ish line PR and he calls the same function twice in a row with a tiny variation. My brain goblin went “you could consolidate these into one call”, “since it’s only one call you could inline it”.
A couple hours later when he came to ask me what I’m smoking I realised my proposed solution had more LoC and was more complex to read. If we needed better performance, step 1 should’ve been to offload this task to an API that wasn’t made with python. Not to mention the next thing this API does is string manipulation and then write to file.
this response is based on the few paragraphs available to non medium members
The second paragraph mirrors my experience with coding to a tee. I may have forgotten to turn off the oven while i was absorbed in Pycharm at least once, and ive certainly given a triumphany “fuck yea” with a raised fist worthy of a freeze frame ending to an '80s film upon succesfully accomplishing a task.
During a recent difficult time in my life, learning to code was the only activity i found that gave me substantial relief from the stress.
First 1/3rd is a bit of fluff but after that, good article. Especially the last 1/3rd.
First 1/3rd is a bit of fluff but after that, good article.
Ah yes, the Wadsworth constant.
