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Where's Your Coding Happy Place?
jammag writes "Cranking out code — your very best code — requires being in the optimal environment, muses developer Eric Spiegel. He explores the pitfalls and joys of the usual locales, cubicle, home, the beach. He claims he's done his best coding on an airplane. In the end, though, he suggests that the best environment is a matter of the environment inside yourself, your internal mood — and to hell with the cubicle or wherever. You have to be focused on quality, regardless of the idiot clients. It's all inside your mind. Where's your coding happy place?"
Lightly sweetened breakfast tea, rainy weather outside, window cracked with a brisk morning breeze.
Oh, yeah, and vim. Emacs can suck it.
Sad to say, but the "best place" to code in depends on what your goal is.
After the best quality code? The best place is a quiet place, free of distractions, where the problem can be easily and clearly understood.
Want the best mood while coding? That's when you consider the balcony of a beach-front apartment, or a nice table with comfy chairs at a restaurant with a view for the afternoon.
Pick your goals, then come up with what you are after.
The trick is to find a place with a good combination of comfort for long-term developer happiness and contentment and actual good results. So a nice office with full snacks, comfortable chairs, nice lounge, music, being treated with courtesy and respect, decent pay, decent benefits, and having the freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner, while still being held accountable for the result is a good mix, and that's where most businesses tend.
Including my own.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sadly, by the time I get to a computer I often lose some great coding ideas.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I need music with no vocals - mostly classical and techno. I have a special playlist called "coding" for those times when I really need to be focused.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Anywhere there is silence. I hate trying to think while listening to people blabbing on the phone or BSing with each other across their cubes.
I don't have a place, I have music and caffeine. If I hear old Crystal Method or Orbital, I immediately think of late nights in the zone with Mountain Dew and Code.
The only enemy of "The Zone" were morning birds.
If I heard birds chirping, I knew I didn't have much time left before my mind would go.
Best? Coding in my cubicle, from 4-11PM, trance/techno playing at moderate volume, and absolutely no interruptions. Productivity is amazing.
Unfortunately, for no articulable reason I'm required to work 8AM-5PM, interruptions are constant (walk-in/stand-up meetings happening constantly, PA system calling people, factory running across the hall, doors never stay closed. Productivity is ... well ... go figure.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
My office, from 8am-5pm, with soft music playing on the speakers, overhead lights off, desk lights on, door open half way (I'm in a somewhat quiet hallway).
Why 8-5? Because its my job, not my life.
at work I'm not allowed to listen to music at all.
Your employers are douchebags.
What the crap could it possibly matter if you have an MP3 player stuck in your ears? I'd love to hear somebody actually make a good case for it. If you're a doctor and you have to listen for pages, or a jet pilot who needs to hear audio alarms - fine. But a coder? Give me a break.
This sort of micro managing "you're still in kindergarten" crap always pisses me right off. It insures an unhappy workplace, and that insures poor results. Who wants to do their very best for someone who treats them like a freaking toddler?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.