Programming Warm Ups?

ResHippie asks: "No athlete or musician would think about just diving in to the day's activity without doing some series of warm ups first. Aside from starting most computing sessions with checking email and the like, I pretty much try to dive right in to the task at hand. It usually takes me a while to get going, though. Does anyone have any routines they go through before coding (or any other work-like activity) that helps?"

Comments

Warmup!

[NanoGator]

"Does anyone have any routines they go through before coding (or any other work-like activity) that helps?""

Not exactly. I usually go straight from my bed to the office. That's why I have a beard and an outfit that I don't want to be seen in public in, causing me to brown-bag lunch for today. (Incidentally, I pack a banana in there because they require no preperation, very efficient food I might add.) Then, I come in, and drink 3 cups of coffee, though the third cup is pretty bitter. By then, it's about 9:30, so I catch up on the news. I post a little bit on Slashdot, those stupid pro-MS ppl get on my nerves. Don't they see that they can download the source code to other people's apps, decipher their coding style, rummage through all of their code, and fix the problems that come up with it? Anyway so I gotta teach those Microsofties what a real OS is. God they're so stupid with their ease of use and their GUI, it's like they don't know how to operate a caps-lock anymore. Oh anyway uh around 10:30 I wrap up my news gathering and get straight to work. I fire up my email and read the joke of the day and carry on my conversations about last week's episode of Enterprise. Unfortunately, we won't see new eps of Enterprise until September so instead we discuss the good old days before Babylon 5 came along inexplicibly rose to popularity. But that's just an aside, I really check my email to see what new defects and updates I need to do to the code. Usually there's something I need to run past a coworker. So I'll go over to him and then we'll have a brief 20 minute discussion about it and how the war in Iraq is going. Oh! Crap! It's 11:30, we better go to lunch early so the lines are short and we can get back in time. At 1:30pm, I come back from lunch and sit down ready for work! Then, there's usually a meeting. So I attend that little hole in time for about 2 hours. At 3:30 I check up on my posts on Slashdot to make sure some dumbfuck moderator didn't mod me as redundant for my Simpsons quote that should have been a +5, Funny. Afterall, that same Comic Store Guy quote was +5, Funny quite a few times after that. Man, I swear the mods are against me. Anyway, at 4:30 I really sit down and work for the next 2 hours, then I go home.

Hope this warmup exercise helps. :)

Re:Deep Hack Mode?

[DancingSword]

Of course not!

If one's in HE-MAN 48-hour Programming-Blitz(tm), then stopping means losing some of that perfect code, right?

-shudder-

sorry, I couldn't resist that, but the concept is actually getting-at the difference between a good session and a good continuum, and the good continuum is more, long-term productive than are a couple of good sessions.

Some can easily work that way, some can't, though, and some won't validly try that, so..

Also, Deep Hack Mode doesn't stop being productive just because one's now 'sleeping on it': sometimes understandings happen only when one's hacking 'unconsciously'.