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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?"
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?
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.)
Cnn or something, a page updated with a short story every few hours. Whatever you do - DONT have slashdot, or any site where you can start typing (Forums, usenet etc). I am 1 1/2 hours into a coding session so far. I've opened one rxvt and typed "vi Lexer.java" - unimpressive.
Other tips I find help
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...