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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?"
Nearly every location on this list is full of distractions. True, I can multitask while the TV is showing something I've seen or do not care about. Unfortunately, if it's a movie out of my Netflix queue, it greatly hampers my progress.
Some of these places are just plain uncomfortable like public transportation or an airplane.
Your bed?! The place where you sleep? Seriously? Granted there aren't a lot of places to suggest, this list blows. I'd be swimming if I were near a pool.
For me the biggest factor is nice studio quality headphones covering my ears producing low volume music. Maybe it's my favorite non-talk radio station (The Current or Radio K) or maybe it's some classical/jazz/rock album I just picked up. My hands and eyes are busy only with the task at hand. An internet connection will help break the monotony for short periods of time and keep me at full operating power. After that, I like to have hot tea, coffee or water at hand to drink and maybe some raw almonds to munch on. A relaxed position and a bathroom within short distance makes for the optimum coding environment.
Assuming I have no questions about requirements or technology, this is the state I usually like to be in.
My work here is dung.
...it was while waiting (and waiting, and waiting) to be called to sit on Jury Duty. I sat outside on the smoking patio (middle of summer) near an outlet with my laptop and generated some of the best code of my life. Perhaps I should start volunteering for Jury Duty...
For me, when I am really seriously coding, I could just about be anywhere; nothing would disturb me. As a matter of fact, a couple a weeks ago a colleague grabbed me on the shoulder at work, while I was hacking away, and said, "We have to get out of here. There's a fire alarm. Didn't you hear the alarm?"
Um, no, and I wasn't wearing any headgear.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I was once designing an algorithm to do something at a lower running time, combining a mixture of data structures and graph theory. I had stayed up almost 22 hours in front of a computer to get it done because I thought I was "almost there".
Then I fell asleep, jerked awake 4 hours later because I had actually solved it in my dream. When I woke up I realized that the solution in my dream was not complete and that there was a flaw with it. With another hour of modification I finished it up.
And Eno! Lots of Eno.