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Re: How do you cope with programmer's fatigue?

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:33 pm
by LonelyProgrammer
Thanks for all the encouragement. Yes, things are better than before - I was literally pulling my hair out when working with PayPal's IPN a year ago, but I have gone from "how are you going to debug if you can't see the error messages!?" to "That line didn't appear as expected in the log file. Geez".

Testing just takes a lot out from me. If it goes fine, then yah, I feel motivated to code more. But when I can't just get the darn thing to work and finally find the culprit, I don't even feel like writing any more lines of code. Perhaps I am something of a workaholic - I could sit up for 8 hours straight hunting down a single bug, and I don't like do it and I won't want to be doing it and the best way seems to be - stop writing code!

Re: How do you cope with programmer's fatigue?

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 11:30 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Sounds like you need to explore TDD ;) Testing then becomes an integral part of your workflow, rather than a debugging process.

My stress levels when working on unit test covered code are considerably lower :)

Re: How do you cope with programmer's fatigue?

Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 11:36 pm
by John Cartwright
papa wrote:Fresh air, red bull, music, coffee, a cig... :)
Best thing I ever did was quit cigs. Worst thing I ever did was quit cigs (less breaks).

Re: How do you cope with programmer's fatigue?

Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 7:37 pm
by Chris Corbyn
On the subject of coffee as a stimulant to stay awake and work, someone at work just brought this back to the surface. Before I started with them SitePoint took a team from the company away for what they called "Code Week". Two closely related internal projects were taking a lot longer to complete than expected so they took a bunch of staff away to a remote location, along with the server admin (who took the servers and set them up ready for work to commence). They spent a week working hard... at any one time there would be at least one person coding, even in the middle of the night.

I like the way Lachlan sum's up coffee consumption vs. productivity on his blog...

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/07/04/code-week/

Quote from Lachlan's Blog:
Lox wrote:All up, Code Week was a massive success, resulting in an incredible amount of output, taking the codebase from 60,000 lines of application code to 120,000 lines (excluding libraries, see graph below). We managed to consume a fairly large amount of coffee — I believe it was close to 1.8 kilograms between 5 people. That translates to about 666 lines of code per cup, which in itself is disturbing

Re: How do you cope with programmer's fatigue?

Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 3:48 pm
by Bill H
I get tired when I'm not programming, and when I am programming I'm disappointed when something works the first time and I don't get to have the fun of debugging it.

Re: How do you cope with programmer's fatigue?

Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 5:55 pm
by Syntac
Bill: Guess you're one of those "the fun is in the chase, not the catch" guys, then?