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Programming Marathons?
Mattygfunk asks: "Coming to the submission date of a major university project the other day, myself and another group member coded in XHTML/CSS and ASP (yuk!) for 27 hours straight to complete it. What is the longest Slashdot readers have coded in a single session? Apart from being more organized and having plenty of coffee, do you have any tips on getting through ultra-long coding sessions?"
Don't.
Plan ahead. Don't wait until the last minute. Your code will be better if you're well organized and on the ball.
At university, a few friends and I spent most of a week in a particular terminal room with no windows or natural light, without any sleep. We had left a six-month group project until the week before.
As I remember it (it's pretty hazy!) we washed Pro-Plus tablets down with a lot of coffee, Coke, Red Bull, etc. I think we were awake for over four days continuously. One of my friends finally went to sleep in an armchair in the common room opposite, just before the deadline. We failed to wake him, even by slapping him. Sometime during the last day, I started shouting rather than speaking, though I wasn't aware of it.
Believe it or not, we got a passing grade. I have absolutely no recollection of the quality of the code.
There's one strange phenomenon I experience after a lot of coding: it feels like my hands are connected directly to my shoulders, and my eyes seem to zoom in so the screen fills my vision. I code faster and better, but it's really weird. Does anyone else get this?
Bad for you. Let us not forget our Korean friend that died after playing EverQuest for 80 hours straight. Our human bodies are simply not made for that kind of exertion.
... that put hair on your chest. I did the same thing once - 27hrs in front of a Sun box, working on a damn OS project. Breaks for food and restroom only. That experience w/ pthreads scarred me for life. hehe - now I'm TA'ing pthreads, go figure. The one thing to take away from that experience is to NEVER do it again. ;) Other than that, congrats.
In other words:
"We partied so hard and were passed out so long that now we have to cram 27 hours of programming into the last 24 hours that we have to complete this project... Since we're already screwed, let's ask Slashdot what we should do!"
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
Programming ASP for 27 hours? You need to attend AA (ASPers Anonymous).
"Hi, my name is Mattygfunk, and I have a problem."
"Hi Mattygfunk!"
"I program in, er, um, ASP."
"That's ok Mattygfunk, we have all been through rough times in our lives, and with the help of friends and this group, you can make it past this troubled time in your life."
"Thanks, AA!"
Keep a separate piece of paper (sticky note, open text file, whatever) for jotting down reminders on how to do things better/correctly for when the code you're currently slamming out fails, and you need to go back and do it over again.
Not if it fails, when.
The human brain requires sleep. Deprive it and your work suffers. Trying to convince yourself (or your boss) of anything else is fucking moronic and a recipe for failure. Maybe you think that's acceptable in the short term, in which case I'm glad I don't work with you on any projects.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
What is the longest Slashdot readers have coded in a single session?
10-15 minutes tops. phew..
cpeterso
Given sufficient quantities of caffeine, humans working in shifts need only about three hours of sleep a day for 4-5 days.
Of course you were able to stay up for 27 hours. But if you had had 3 hours of sleep after the first 18, your next six would have been far more productive than the 9 hours you actually got to code.
Also, you'd be amazed how SMART taking a 3-hour break, with code swimming around your head, will make you.
I think if there's a team up continuously, hard at work on an exciting project, then 5-7 days of 3 hours a night ought to be doable.
Personally, I have done this (but without a team) on a few weekends, when I had very exciting code I was working on.
A semi-recent experience: came home friday (not this past one) and coded till 4 in the morning, fell asleep at the keyboard until the sun woke me seven-ish, saw my project on the screen (well, under the screensaver), so I got up, drank a bit of coffee, and sat down and coded continuously until the afternoon, ate something, coded more. I didn't have incentive to finish by monday and be really tired during the beginning of the week, so i went to bed around 9 and slept till 9 in the morning (thus friday and saturday averaged to 7.5 hours of sleep), but I know that I could have again gotten only a few hours of sleep and coded all of sunday as well.
I think that 48 minus 6 (for sleep) hours of continuous coding is about the extent someone can do without really really pushing herself or himself.
So, take-home lesson:
When people say that it really makes a difference to take a break from coding once in awhile, to get your head together and get a big picture of the project, maybe realize some of your mistakes while you still have time to change them, they mean it.
TAKE BREAKS, PEOPLE!!!!
At the very least, sleep 3 hours out of every twenty four.
(On the other hand, I believe that six-hour nights are sustainable indefinitely.)
While I haven't gone quite 27 hours, I have gone 18+ hours in Perl and PHP. These are the only pieces of advice I can offer:
-Windows open: Fresh Air + Sunlight = GOOD!
-Music up: Radio or playlist, either way try to get a variety of songs/music you know.
-Multitask: Well, this might make it not an exclusive coding session, but having AOL IM/ICQ open to talk to people makes it more bareable than it would be otherwise. Also, having an internet window open just at a random site makes it easy to take short 30 second 'breaks'.
-Swivel Chair/Titlty Chair: So you can move around some and 'stretch' out.
-Coffee/Mountain Dew/Jolt/Bawls/Etc: 'nough said
-Food: Good snacks that don't really drain you. For me, these include things like Cashews, Chex Party Mix, and Kettle Chips (if you haven't had these potato chips, SHAME ON YOU!). Avoid anything that is really sugar-rich though, as it'll give you that little boost, then kill ya and make you want to sleep. Wanting to sleep=bad code.
If I can, I try to limit myself to no more than four hours of nonstop coding at a time, with a lengthy break in between that doesn't involve much brain activity and that will allow me to rest physically. TV is ideal for this, but a bit of online gaming will do the trick as well. I think the longest coding marathon I ever did was 18 hours, and by the end I was writing horrible, nearly unmaintainable code that I later regretted.
Don't let the cleaning company set the alarm on you.
I got an adrenaline boost once when a cop pulled his gun and started screaming at me. I had been running around in my socks, checking on a couple of systems. This guy was seriously amped and very pissed when he found out that I didn't deserve a beating. Luckily his partner was calm, and chuckling a little. The cop that was pissed kept asking me what my boss would do if he knew I was working all night. All I could do was laugh and tell him my boss better damn well be pleased. That didn't help the situation...
Taking CS at Purdue, we had two weeks for each
project. They each took me about two hours to
complete. We had 4 weeks for the final project
so I started two days before it was due thinking
it would be a 4 hour job. 36 hours later... I
only took bathroom breaks. Got it in on time.
I once worked 54 hours straight building sets for a play at my old high school. I went home, got 4 hours of sleep, cooked "breakfast" for all the people sleeping on the floor of my apartment, and went back for another 30+ hours to finish it (things got a little hazy towards the end there).
;-)
I didn't do caffeine at the time, either (I was one of those wacky straight-edge punks). Regular physical activity keeps the blood flowing and the limbs from cramping up or going to sleep. We also had a hot chick that brought us pizza every 6-12 hours, which is key
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
do you have any tips on getting through ultra-long coding sessions?
... ponders ... ponders ...
Yeah, remember the pain and agony of those 27 hours, realize that it's impossible to write quality programs with that strategy, and never do it again!
It's even more fun when clueless mangement tries to get you to do that in the Real World. Feh...
Oh well, Back to my job search!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
What I do is brainstorm ideas during the time that I am not coding anything. When you write down all your ideas, visualize the structure of your code (especially if you are designing an API), it really helps when you actually sit down and start writing. I don't think that I have ever sat and wrote anything for 27 straight hours, but I have pulled all-nighters, from 8:00AM one day to 5:00 PM the next, and accomplished some things. You definitatly start to screw up after a while though. Good luck, Ditto
The initial port of Mozilla to Qt occurred immediately after the Mozilla source was released. I wasn't there myself, but apparently it was a 5 day (and night) event. More info on the current status of QtMozilla here
I did a work week's worth of coding in my "spare time". I was supposed to go out on Saturday, but I didn't get a call from the guy I was supposed to meet up with. Ah, well... I chewed up a *huge* hunk of the TODO list. And on Monday morning, I got up, showered, and went to my regular office job.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I've found that a much better replacement is good fresh, clean, cold water. Fill up a nice big 32 oz. bottle and take a swallow every few minutes. Not only is it good for you, consistent cold water intake throughout the day keeps you awake almost like caffeine does, only without the nasty side effects.
STDOUT> 2500 lines undocumented PERL.
By a stroke of luck it actually worked and did what I wanted it to do.
I do however count not having to ever make any changes to it as the luckiest thing after simply making it. After too much work and wayyyy too much coffee you start writing things that are completely impossible to work out once you're in a sane state of mind again. Basically the type of thing Frost would have written had he known PERL...
The best way to approach a project like this is with a thirst for discovery and new experience and [let me emphasise this] no intention whatsoever of deploying the results in a production environment.... ever
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
First I have to say that ultra-long coding sessions are NOT the best way to meet schedule.
That said, you sometimes have to do it. In that case, the following substances may be of some help to be efficient past 12 hours of coding
- Coffee (of course)
- Glucoronamide (in Guronsan(R) in association with caffeine and Vit.C)
- Adrafinil or Modafinil (in Provigil(R), Olmifon(R) or Modiolal(R))
Note : in some countries, modafinil and adrafinil are only delivered on medical prescription (indication: narcolepsy).My longest coding session using only coffee was +/- 24 hours. With Adrafinil I did 72h+.
My advice : avoid coding more than 48h in a row : after 48h, the number of bugs seems to increase exponentially even if you feel perfectly awake.
HTH
at my first pro job i came in one day at 9am. we had an unmeetable deadline so I ended up staying until 11pm (i still wasn't done). i drove ~30 mins home. as i was going to bed i had a realization, which i scribbled on a sheet of paper. i tried to go to sleep, but i ended up saying "screw it", got dressed and went back to work. i got to work about 1am. i worked until about 2pm, went home and slept for a long time. total hours 13+13 = 26 with a two hour "break" (an hour which was driving).
The most I've ever actually coded in a single session would be around 35 hours or so. However, I've had the lucky experience of having 100+ hour work weeks of coding, mainly due to the fact that I was recently employed (and so very eager to do a good job), and my boss was of the type to think that everything had to be done yesterday, and that any price was worth paying to get it done.
;) I sure can't do it, but I really have to hand it to the people who can.
Needless to say, I burned out like a match. The best thing I can suggest for anyone stuck doing this is to use it as an education lesson. No matter how much caffeine you want to put through your body, your mind simply can't take that much. In the end, I was writing code that all ended up being rewritten and reworked several months later when I realized I hadn't seen the big picture.
Even more important than learning the lesson yourself, use it to teach your boss(es) the same lesson. We all know a lot of managers don't understand the process, and think that pushing their programmers to work insane hours is somehow more productive. Make sure you document any setbacks or roadblocks you encounter because of programming under such conditions, and make sure you explain each and every one of them. It might take a bit, but they do get the point, and soon you'll be on your way to a good programming schedule, and doing things the productive way.
Of course, if you're one of those guys who *can* program for 100 hours a week and put in all this extra time without making mistakes, you're probably doomed.
From 10h to 21h of the next day, with just an one-hour break for lunch. That's 32h.
But the interesting part is: after that many hours, I was on an altered state, just like I was on drugs, I just didn't want to stop coding! and when I finnaly went home I was still very awake for some hours, I just couldn't sleep.
I think there it's like when you're doing phisical exercise for hours, and your body starts producing endorphin, and you feel like superman.. something like that, for the brain.
...beer. It just makes you drowsy, and you'll need to visit the restroom more often. Apparently 2 monitors can help though. ...vodka. Just drink the redbull neat. Tastes disgusting, but think of it as pennance for leaving your final CS-project to the last two days.
I have to take serious issue with the numerous comments here about how long hours spent coding leads to kludges and hacks and inelegant code that is bound to fail. On the contrary, my best work has always been done in marathon sessions. While I have to agree that waiting until the last moment to get a project completed is assinine, there is nothing wrong with long marathon sessions.
;)
In my experience, the worst code is written in small chunks, writing a bit of code, researching some more or going home, then writing another small chunk; the larger picture of the synthesis of the entire project never seems to come together this way. Unfortunately, this is the way most of us are encouraged to code... with lots of breaks and sleep in between. I have found that when I am in "the zone" coding, the best thing I can do is stay there as long as possible, going for as much as 72 hours at a time, and sometimes falling asleep on the keyboard, only to wake a few hours later and keep going. The code written this way in 1 week is more productivity than 6 months of my work normally. The code I write is elegant, and mostly bug free. At these times, the entire structure of the code all comes together in my brain, and I am just typing it out as fast as my fingers will go. Sleep is a waste of time when your brain is in overdrive. If you are looking for ways to "get through" these sessions, however, then you are not in the session and your best bet is to just go home. When you don't want the session to end and you are willing to forego sleep, food, restroom, nicotene, sex, just to keep going, THEN you are going to write some damn nice code, so don't you dare go home
But don't confuse long hours staring at the code and poking in a few lines with a marathon coding session.
I once spent from 6:00AM Friday morning till 7PM Monday in my office. The office was tiny, bad light, etc... with a pungent view of an alley in Pioneer Square (Seattle). Around midnight each night I would set the alarm on my cellphone to go off at 3:00AM and try to sleep on the floor. I found that I didn't actually sleep that much, but did feel somewhat refreshed.
My wife, of course, did not understand... she became suspicious at about 9PM of the first day. She became even more suspicious when I told her she couldn't come to the office to visit. The end? I finally got home and showed her the end result of the marathon. Her response: "You spent 3 days working on that!???".
Sometimes it's very refreshing and eye-opening to be married to a non-techie.
One Expresso Machine, Used, From Goodwill.... $10
One Coffee Machine, Used from Goodwill....... $7
One Dual Burner Portable Stove, Goodwilled... $20
One Box of Tetly and One box of Red Rose Tea. $6
One Box of Hot Coco packets, Swiss Miss...... $3
One Pot for Boiling the Water from Sink...... $10
One Brand new Tea Kettle From K-Mart......... $8
One Big tin of Water Sanitation Tabs......... $20
Three pounds of good ground coffee........... $20
Five Nights in an decent Mexican Hotel....... $90
Ten cans of Wizard Air Freshener............. $15
Ten Gallon Barrel for holding clean water.... $20
Enough Ritalin too keep Little Jimmy Straight and on course for a month from a man named Jesus in a bar
$50 and my Watch
One 72 Hour, ballz out, five man, If we pull this off we are gonna be rich as fuck, forget this Vacation in the Sun shit coding spree, and subsequent 36 phisical crash and burn
Priceless
There are some things Money can't buy, Like 6 days of your life back that you wasted in some mexican hotel, in which none of you or your friends used the lovely "companion services" that surounded it, doing what was almost could be concidered a get rich quick scheme that in the end was just another sad bomb out like we have seen so many of before in the tech industry
For Everything Else, there is Ritalin
(Score:0, Interesting)
Herpies. Every time I've done a several day burnout project, I've ended up with a painful patch of herpies. Stress reaction or something.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
well, thats precisely why we have caffine beverages such as the Monster Energy Drink
Great Atrocit
Um, you don't actually code better, you just *think* you do. Just like blondes *think* they have more fun - it's all about your grip on reality ;)
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! - Antonio Gramsci.
The best advice I can give is to work with somebody else, and talk everythring through. When you're sleep deprived, the msot important thing is to retain focus. As soon as you lose it, you'll drift off. You can knock off specific tasks from a to-do list with only half your brain working, but creative thinking, problem solving, and the like will derail really fast under sleep-dep. To alleviate this, talk things through until you have a concrete to-do list. This forces you to focus, and your partner will bring you back in line if you start to drift. Once you have a to-do list, work on it alone until you get stuck. Ask for help. Talk it through. Repeat. Just remember, if your mind starts to wander, you lose.
In short, don't do it. If it doesn't get done, don't do this.
Posting Anonymously...
In school, I was working on LISP assignment for like 24 hours straight. I couldn't figure the damn thing out (HUGE LISP program, like 9 or 10 pages) I don't remember what the assignment was, now I could do it no problem. Anyways, about 11am the day it was due, I said fuck it. I'm going to get drunk. About 3 pitchers of beer later, it was class time. I decided I was way too drunk to go, so of course I strolled by the classroom window and mooned it. Hopped in my car, drove down to the local sports pub, where I met a nice lady in her 50's and proceded to go down on her in a booth at the bar. I then passed out in a puddle of my own vomit near the front gate of my apartment complex. Woke up with a massive hangover, a bloodied chin, and no wallet.
So, lots of people are giving good advice and bad advice. This is my advice:
No matter how enticing it seems, don't do what I did.
(P.S. I know a few folks from my old school read slashdot and if this story sounds familiar please refer to me by my handle or first name.)
Cheers
You want to know the number-one tip for surviving a coding death-march? Don't start. Number two? Make sure you have competent coworkers who won't get you into a mess requiring a marathon session.
Story times, boys and girls, posted anonymously to protect the guilty. I work for a smallish company that, until March of 2000, employed the most self-conceited programmer I have ever met. He bragged about his skills to anyone and everyone--worse yet, he had a way of convincing other non-programmers that he was the god of code. Unfortunately, among the people he snowed was the boss, which would play itself out in a rather dramatic way. There were five others in the department, including myself, and while we couldn't stand him, we put up with him because he managed to produce reasonably good work on time. So when he bragged to the boss how good he was, we sighed and said nothing.
Our little company hit the jackpot when we got a juicy contract from another company in the aerospace business. They wanted what basically amounted to a sophisticated tracking system--in other words, given in-bound object X, calculate speed and trajectory, and extrapolate from a stinkin' huge database its probable identity and (from an even huger database) its probable targets. In other words, it was important to be able to distinguish say, between a passanger jet and a SCUD missle. The boss immediately assigns the code god to what he considers the toughest part: the extrapolation of identity and targets.
A couple of months go by, and we start noticing a disturbing trend. The god of code has submitted less and less code to the versioning system, until it drops to zero. He insists that he is hard at work, and just doesn't want to commit anything because, in his words, "It's too delicate at this point--I need to toughen it up before I'll feel comfortable commiting it." This is code, and not some greenhouse flower we are talking about. Nevertheless, he convinces the boss everything is fine. Time passes. We only have three days before our first demo date, and even the boss is beginning to have doubts. Finally, he approaches the code god and demands that he commit the code that he has written so that we can all start debugging the system for the demo. Nothin' doing. The boss calls him into his office. We hear their voices gradually rise, until suddenly things get very quiet.
I get called to the boss's office. Mr. code god is staring at the floor and doesn't look up. The boss tells me to take his computer out of the cubicle, along with any notes, papers, and files, and put it in the spare cubicle, where I am to review his code.
In five month, the guy had managed to produce a beautiful GUI for NT, something that wasn't even speced for, a complete API for querying the system (which was the last thing he submitted) and managed to write not one line of code for identification and extrapolation. Turns out that he couldn't figure out how to do it, and was too embarrassed to ask for help. Three days left to go before the first product demo, and the very heart of the project had not even been started.
We quickly decided that we would have to fake the demo. The sales guy, who was a really cool guy, explained how he thought we could salvage the demo. Basically, it was nothing more than a script. The system would correctly identify each object and spit out a list of possible targets because it was told, along with the telemetry data, what to say. To prevent the guys from snooping around too much, we took the GUI that Code God has made and "configured" it so that whenever anything was done outside of the scripted parameters, it would freeze up NT, requiring a reboot. I'm ashamed to say it, but it worked. The reviewers were very impressed with the GUI, and with how well the system responded to random data, but were disappointed to hear that there were still bugs in the frontend that needed resolving.
Then came the death march--one month filled with 120 hour weeks. During the final week, I got three hours of sleep. None of the other guys fared much better. But we delivered a working system that had a fantastic frontend.
As for Mr. Code God, we never heard from him again. But if you happen to suspect that you are using our program, you can easily find a little Easter Egg we put in at the last minute: create a new object, entitled "Code God" (Caps necessary) and with a range factor of 666. Leave all the other fields blank, and submit it. You'll see his image (I wish we could have photoshopped it) and some choice words. Don't worry about deleting the entry--it will delete itself once you click on the "Kill me now" button...
If you stay up for 3 days straight writing code (you get on a hot streak, in a way)
When you wake up after you crash and burn, you'll look back at the code and wonder "I wrote this?"
I know everyone likes to brag about how many dozens of hours they worked in a row to finish some critical project. I know that most programmers think they can live on coffee and pizza and Mountian Dew (and no sleep) for days and days and still stay razor sharp...but unfortunatly reality disagrees with you. My experience has shown that almost all programmers start to lose effiency after the 10 hour mark, and by the time you hit 18 hours or so, you're better off just getting some sleep and picking it back up in the morning.
Now I'm sure I'm going to get barraged with anecdotes of projects saved from disaster by marathon coding sessions, but ask yourself this important question...Why was it necessary to do this in the first place? When it comes to software development, it's not like it sneaks up on you. Yeah, sure, deadlines get pushed up and requirements gets changed, but the software industry is not the only one that has to deal with the slings and arrows of trying to get shit done in the real world. Which begs the question, why does it happen?
The reason it happens is because we let it happen. Some of us almost WANT it to happen so we can get our marathon coding merit badge and show it off as some trophy of programming prowess. Whenever a manager makes some comment like "Well, I don't think we can make the schedule, but hopefully we'll pull it together at the end" my resume starts shooting out of the office printer. Don't tolerate it. It's simply not professional. If shit happens...adjust the schedule or trim functionality. As demonstrated by Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month", those are pretty much your only two reasonable options. Turning your development staff into a bunch of zombies is just Bad Form. DON'T put up with it.
I started at 6 am and I am still at work. 16:15 hours and counting.
just out of curiousty... which caffeine drinks do you guys like the most?
Ah c'mon. ASP isn't that bad a technology - it's a simple OO wrapper around CGI concepts and you can use Perl with it. Not just that evil VBscript spawn of little billy.
My advice: this is not something you want to do.
However, there are times when you know you aren't going to get your work done in the time allotted, no matter how hard you work. So, you have to work smarter, with better tools. Problem is, you don't have the tools. So, you get the insane idea to build them.
Let me rephrase this another way: You can't do what you have to in, say eight weeks, much less the two that you have, so, you figure out what you need to be able to do it in one week, and spend the other week building that. As crazy as this sounds sometimes it is a viable plan.
Sometimes the meta problem is easier to visualize, specify, and code than the problem itself.
Of course this requires a clear mind, focused on the task at hand, and more than a little courage: after all instead of 25% productivity for the time available, you expect to be at 0% real productivity for half of it and 200% for the other half. There ain't no guarantee that you're gonna be right. These kind of risks are best not mentioned to management weenies and those without the stomach for technical roller-coasters.
Others have mentioned that such hurculean efforts result in shitty code. Sure, you throw all the software engineering processes away, because they are just too heavyweight for that sort of thing. This is extreme programming at it's finest -- pipelined design, development, and test. Still, it will lack a certain, er, polish, and possibly robustness. But, you have an ace up your sleave.
See, you don't have to solve the meta problem of providing the tools to solve any real problem of a particular class on time -- you just have to solve it so it provides the tools for the particular problem you've got. Just make sure that whatever bugs there are don't manifest themselves on the particular data you have to deal with now.
Of course, anything that improves productivity is a good thing, right? Why not always take this approach?
Because solving meta problems instead of "getting one's job done" is not "getting one's job done" except in the kind of impossible deadline situations I mentioned. It's a pity, but that's probably not the business you're in -- while a particular C++ preprocessor to instrument memory allocation/deallocation and pointer dereferences might be a great product in it's own right, you just need to find the memory leaks in the code for which you have a customer.
Of course, with good project management, you won't find yourself in such situations, but such ideal circumstances rarely arise.
You could've hired me.
A few years back at Purdue, I was in EE365, the microprocessor design course for EE and CmpE undergrads. Through a terrible mishap involving rm and a misplaced whitespace character, our project directory (finished, and working with a few minor bugs) got wiped while trying to clean out some Mentor Graphics temp files. All the schematics, all the VHDL, all the whatever. *poof* One week to go.
Now, there were plenty of workstations available-- many more than there were teams working in the class. Unfortunately, most of them were old 50MHz machines. Not quite enough to do the simulations in a timely fashion. As in, not quite enough to get *any* of them done in a week.
There were, however, 6 or 8 HP VISE workstations that just screamed. Obviously, in high demand. So, my partner and I waited until one opened at 3 in the morning, and proceeded to camp it out for an entire week. We took shifts, brought eachother food, and covered eachothers' classes. The last two days we were there straight through.
I have never been more tired in my life, but we got it done.
My advice? Don't do it. Make backups. If, like us, making a backup would be bigger than your disk quota and took too long to send home via a modem-- MAKE THEM RAISE YOUR QUOTA.
My longest marathon was 40 hours at work. I arrived at 8am on Wed and left at 11:30pm on Thursday. However, it wasn't 40 hours straight in front of the screen; our build and test process (that we run frequently) took 15 mins at the time so I and my teammate would take foosball breaks every so often. And then when I fell asleep while waiting for JBuilder to reach a breakpoint, I decided it was time for a nap. Slept for two hours (this was Thurs afternoon, after I'd already worked for 30 hours) and then went back at it.
:)
We got the code checked in, working and unit tested by the midnight Thursday deadline. All in all, that week was over 80 hours long, in 5 days.
As for the quality of the code, it wasn't GREAT, but it wasn't too crappy either. All in all, not too bad an experience. I was even able to go down to the gym in the morning and take a shower, to help refresh the ol' brain cells.
And during my 4th year in University, I pulled probably 30 all-nighters, which typically involved a full day of class, then a one hour commute home, then work all night, then commute back to school, then class all day. I was glad to leave the stressful school world and return to the easy 80 hour weeks of the working world
I started my procrastinating career and thus all nighter practice way back in high school. But it wasn't until I saw coverage of the 1986 Race Across America that I saw what is truely required for a multi day push. The RAAM is a bike race starting on the West Coast of America and finishing on the East Coast. Unlike most other races this one isn't broken into stages. It's simply a matter of who can get there first. In 1986 a man named Pete Penseyres set the average speed record which appears to stand today. His secret was sleep management. He had someone observe him while he slept for some time before the race to determine when he would typically experience REM sleep. Then during the race, his support team would pull him off his bike, lay him down in the support van, and let him sleep until his eyes stopped moving. Then they put him on his bike and sent him off for another day of riding. The net result was obviously favorable. He had competition that was actually faster but nobody was as consistent. Those who would have beat him almost always crashed while hallucinating from lack of REM sleep. So those here who are preaching the "3 hour break", I think are on to something.
Once in 1999, when I took six months off, I started around 8 am and stopped coding at 8 am next day.
:-)
When I was 24 I used to do a lot of 100 hr weeks; once after my third 16 hour workday I had a "panic attack"; it felt like a stroke; left side numb; couldn't move left arm; felt like I couldn't breath. I basically learned at that point working craploads of hours doesn't mean you're a hero; it actually means you're an inefficient person who cannot complete their job in a normal 40 hour week.
If you want to earn some REAL geek cred, learn how to do what you do in a normal 8 hour day. Trust me, it's far more rewarding to be efficient. Plus it's just so cool to be done with your shit by 5pm while everybody else is there all night
BTW I recommend taking six months off if you ever can. I just paid my rent in advanced, coded, fished, and went to bars. I was broke as hell by the end of it, but I wouldn't trade that experience for nothing.
My longest stretch is 81 hours. However, I'm kind of cheating here. I went to classes on Friday, didn't hit the lab until about 2 pm after waking up at around 9:00 am. I then coded straight until 5 pm on Monday afternoon. I took bathroom breaks, of course, and occasionally ate but I ate while programming. The assignment was due at 11:59 pm on Monday so I submitted it with lots of time. Still, only about 75 hours of that was spent in front of a computer.
I didn't get the best grade ever on that assignment but still, got a 9 in the course (9 being the top grade you can get). Later, I went back and TA'ed the course, spending a while as head TA while still an undergrad.
There's no way I could do that now. And even back then, I would have been more productive with some sleep. These days, I figure 12 - 14 hours of coding in a day is my limit and I'm not going to be able to keep up that level all that long. Hey, I'm pushing thirty years old now. Heh.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Since I read this horror story about how a nice guy got Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, I stopped doing all-night coding sessions.
-Kraft
Live and let live
Here are some tips that I find especially useful for a session like this -
-There more concentrated the caffine solution, the longer you can remain awake without having to pee.
-Prepare all food and string in a mushy liquid-like substance, it will save on precious coding time.
-Remember all of the corner-cutters that you were told never to take? They are now your best friends.
-Do not bring any firearms into the room.
-If you wish, bring music, but be sure it doesn't have words to it or give you an urge to dance.
-If nature calls, wait until it's SCREAMING!
-If another person(s) will come within 100m of you during the coding time (and are not on the team), be sure to have restraining orders in effect.
-And most of all - have fun (well, maybe not).
That's called an out of body experience.
Enjoy!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
For the same professor who taught both classes. I remember her leaving for the day and coming back in the next morning when I pointed at her and said "YOU!".
... they aren't good for the human body but if you must I suggest Dunkin Donut's "Box of Joe". Its a giant coffee drinkbox. I don't even know if they still make it since I don't live near a Dunkin Donuts anymore.
She started laughing.... It was a challenge but I got A's on both assignments.
Don't have these sessions unless you have to
61 hours, long weekend, "simple" multitasker in x86 assembler.
.....
V8 tomato juice works well, about 1 every 3 hours.
Don't forget to break for food once in a while, too -- not so much for physical reasons, but the 5-10 minute distraction is good for the brain, plus it might help you get out of a "bad track of thought", and into a good one.
Lastly -- Guinness Stout helped me through my Discrete Systems and Signals class
Good luck!
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
I'm not a drug advocate but light doses of speed would work (or ephedrine as a substitute). Be careful however b/c high blood pressure can cause stroke or heart attack.
In the end it's not worth it to procrastinate on projects or go crazy trying to get them done quickly. The sooner (see my name for intended pun) you learn to schedule/plan your projects the better you will become as a future employee and developer.
72 hours straight baby! My esophageal opening wouldn't close properly after that for two weeks because I downed three two litre bottles of coke (one for each day)
Bad for you. Let us not forget our Korean friend that died after playing EverQuest for 80 hours straight. Our human bodies are simply not made for that kind of exertion.
While I agree that you shouldn't sit in one place working on a computer for such an extended period, I would add that our bodies were made for exertion - not for sitting on our backsides all day - and that a lack of regular exercise and/or breaks is also a contributor to physical/mental problems.
In short - long sessions of physical inactivity of any form are bad for you, whether that be watching TV all day or coding all night.
This is why older programmers are having trouble getting work.
The bosses know that all-nighters are part of the job, and only younger geeks can do it.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
MAKE THEM RAISE YOUR QUOTA
Visions of the BOFH:
"My account is full. I need more space."
"What was your username again?"
*crunch, grind*
"Okay, you now have 4MB free."
"Great, so I have 8 total? The 4 I started with and 4 more?"
"No, you have 4 total."
100% disk compression with rm -rf !
Sounds easy...
while (distance 26.2mi)
{
self.place_one_foot_in_front_of_the_other();
}
self.collapse();
Simple!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Try Adobe GoLive. Generates the cleanest HTML I've seen to date.
I used to write HTML by hand too. Don't base your opinion of all WYSIWYG editors on FrontPage (yuck). My roommate is the best web designer I've ever met, and he uses nothing but GoLive.
There are reputedly no known side effects. You just have to convince your doctor that you have narcolepsy, which shouldn't be difficult if you are halfway into a marathon session at the time!
If my programming Zen is in full swing, I won't tire of coding and am usually pumped after I'm finished with the project, like a rush of congraduatory adrenaline. In fact, I usally forget to eat and get mad if I have to make a restroom pitstop. Usually, I only need a break if I'm stuck on a piece of the project; will just need to step away, let my pulse slow down, take some Excedrin, eat something warm, power-nap, etc. I usually only drink coffee (actually, usually hot cocoa w/ coffee poured in) or green tea if I'm cold. There is nothing worse than trying to type away with cold-numb hands. I always have my water bottle near my workstation; a lot healthier than soda or iced tea; juice gets nasty if it's no longer cold; and cola usually leaves that film in your mouth that seems particularly annoying with on the computer.
I think the most important thing is to keep what you need at your workstation and always replenish. Just don't eat over the keyboard, cause that just gets nasty over time! Here's what I keep handy at my desk: water bottle; Kleenex; Excedrin; Lip Medex; Listerine mouth strips; music; spare sweatshirt. Getting up to eat or just splash the face with water is always a quick but healthy break.