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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.
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...
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!
I'm at my most productive at 2am the night before the project is scheduled to go live.
I'm at my second most productive at 9am the following day while I'm patching the running code on the live system to fix what I didn't have time to test the night before.
Dang, dad, I am 35. Can't you write your COBOL some other way?
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.
Best productivity is in India. Not sure if it's the food or what... but I am 4x as productive as in the US.
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 love coding with my boss in my shoulder pseudo-auditing my code and constantly reminding me the project schedule...
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.
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.