True!! I love that part!!
then I have to somehow explain what seemed obvious to me for that split second where magic struck…
Damn, I can’t think about something for more than a minutes or two without getting distracted… Maybe I’m the one who’s broken.
That’s the fun part. We’re all broken in some way.
Proof by ponder
Wait until she walks in on him explaining the problem out loud to a rubber duck.
My math teacher in high school always said “math is 90% looking” and if you didn’t get the task directly: “look again” … Funny part is, that actually worked for most of the class xD
Sounds like Feynman’s algorithm.
- Write down the problem
- Think about it really hard
- Write down the solution
And this is why I moved to using white boards.
I wish I understood how to use them. I have half written scraps of paper and random text in random text files. Notebooks are about the best I can do. I can’t write very well on a vertical board. It is really really uncomfortable and I end up obsessing on how bad it looks over solving the problem. Sometimes drawing on my iPad instead works, but that is another place to look for things.
I do like using Markdown + Mermaid. Obsidian is a nice little note taking app once I got it configured. It just takes me forever.
I can tell you exactly what he is thinking, it’s either one of these:
Who the fuck wrote this bullshit?
Or
Why the fuck did I write this bullshit?
Sometimes the first, then eventually the second when you realize you did it but forgot you did it.
“Ok fine, I’m going to see who committed this atrocity,
git blame, oh crap.”
If I intimidate it by staring at it long enough, it’ll work eventually.
Tbh a good builder/technician will do this too when faced with a complicated fix
Same thing; every action has an opposite reaction, whether it’s code or physical engineering
I’m a carpenter, I do high end stuff for rich people with really expensive pieces of wood. I’ll stare as much as I need to on the issues I have or even before starting anything. Need to think about every way it could go wrong.
How do you prepare for “world ends in nuclear holocaust?” Seems a bit difficult to account for.
Cup of tea
I used to work in an office with 4 other developers. It was a common occurrence to have the lights go off in the room, for energy saving.
Simone would wave their arm, then go back to staring.
God bless Simone
I work in a dedicated room in my house (remote developer). During the day I don’t really need to turn the lights on—windows and a skylight. The sun sets and sometimes I really just don’t notice. My wife will come in at some point and scold me for working in the dark, claiming it’s bad for my eyes (as if staring at a screen all day isn’t already).
I actually rather enjoy that rather not-subtle marker of the passage of time and how entrancing “the zone” can be such that I fail to even notice that.
At least they’re moving. Sometimes it goes off and nobody reacts at all.
Sometimes figuring out what you’re supposed to do is most of the project.
True, true. Working in the dark was kinda nice on those days
I don’t like coding, so I became a systems administrator.
Today, I spent about three hours “coding” a script. Before I started my testing phase to see if all the code put together would work as intended, I just did a pass over the code. I literally just stared at it for a solid 20+ minutes to make sure it made sense.
I imagine and form of “real” programming is going to require a lot more staring for a lot longer just to make sure the code isn’t profoundly screwed up.
Sometimes, very rare but still, I can stare at the screen for the whole day and write zero lines of code. These rare days are the most demanding and the most stressful. Any monkey can “write code”, understanding the business logic of a complex application - that’s a very taxing mental work.
What I do is I read over something, take a nap, and then read it over again. If I don’t get it after that I’ll ask someone for help.
Taking a break helps a lot. I like to multitask for this reason and to not feel like wasting time. Also, important to remember to eat. There’s an obvious drop in my clarity of mind right before lunch.
First taking a nap and only then asking for help. I like this approach.
100%. Really, just go do something other than what you’ve been focusing on, then come been to it. When I was coding, I would go take a walk when I’d get stuck. 9 times out of ten the answer would pop into my head when I’d stepped away. A few times I even dreamed of the answer while sleeping.
The unconscious mind processes what you were doing during REM sleep, so it’s really efficient way of getting things done.
After 15 minutes I switch tasks and come back to it at a later date. Do the dishes or something
I had a theoretical math professor. He said something along the lines of, “Being a theoretical math professor is the best job in the world. You can lean back in your chair, put your feet on your desk and close your eyes, and no one can tell if you’re working or having a nap.”
