If staring at it isn’t giving the results you expect, try not staring at it. Math, much like photons, functions differently when observed.
Damn, I can’t think about something for more than a minutes or two without getting distracted… Maybe I’m the one who’s broken.
That’s the fun part. We’re all broken in some way.
I used to work in an office with 4 other developers. It was a common occurrence to have the lights go off in the room, for energy saving.
Simone would wave their arm, then go back to staring.
At least they’re moving. Sometimes it goes off and nobody reacts at all.
Sometimes figuring out what you’re supposed to do is most of the project.
True, true. Working in the dark was kinda nice on those days
I work in a dedicated room in my house (remote developer). During the day I don’t really need to turn the lights on—windows and a skylight. The sun sets and sometimes I really just don’t notice. My wife will come in at some point and scold me for working in the dark, claiming it’s bad for my eyes (as if staring at a screen all day isn’t already).
I actually rather enjoy that rather not-subtle marker of the passage of time and how entrancing “the zone” can be such that I fail to even notice that.
God bless Simone
Aside from “learning to spell hypnotized or just trusting your phone knows better than you,” there are a bunch of tricks we use.
- Staring at it and going over the code path
- Talking to a proverbial duck
- Going out for a proverbial cheeseburger
- Sleeping on it
Half of these tricks force the brain to stop confirming and start seeing, which is our biggest error source. The rest of these tricks let the problem ruminate in our subconscious which is sometimes really good at solving shit.
1, 3 and 4 (in that exact order) have almost always gotten things moving again. rubber ducking it just feels “forced” to me.
You can just talk to one of your more inept coworkers.
I talk to myself almost constantly, even when not programming. Rubber ducking is second nature to me now. Though, IDK which came first.
Haven’t heard of the proverbial cheeseburger… gonna stare at this phrase for a bit.
If you don’t get it, go for a proverbial cheeseburger
And this is why I moved to using white boards.
I wish I understood how to use them. I have half written scraps of paper and random text in random text files. Notebooks are about the best I can do. I can’t write very well on a vertical board. It is really really uncomfortable and I end up obsessing on how bad it looks over solving the problem. Sometimes drawing on my iPad instead works, but that is another place to look for things.
I do like using Markdown + Mermaid. Obsidian is a nice little note taking app once I got it configured. It just takes me forever.
Don’t ask him, he will be angry and mumbling something about “the zone”.
I can tell you exactly what he is thinking, it’s either one of these:
Who the fuck wrote this bullshit?
Or
Why the fuck did I write this bullshit?
Sometimes the first, then eventually the second when you realize you did it but forgot you did it.
“Ok fine, I’m going to see who committed this atrocity,
git blame, oh crap.”
I’ve often been accused of looking angry when I’m thinking about a problem. Of course I’m angry! How dare the solution allude me! 😡
Allude what to you?
Probably alluding to the fact that it’s eluding them 🤷
Maybe “aluding” is because the solution is both eluding and alluring at the same time, so one keeps following its syren song but when you get to where you think the solution is, it’s not there.
Certainly it matches the feeling I got with some of the development problems I’ve faced.
If I intimidate it by staring at it long enough, it’ll work eventually.
After 15 minutes I switch tasks and come back to it at a later date. Do the dishes or something
I don’t like coding, so I became a systems administrator.
Today, I spent about three hours “coding” a script. Before I started my testing phase to see if all the code put together would work as intended, I just did a pass over the code. I literally just stared at it for a solid 20+ minutes to make sure it made sense.
I imagine and form of “real” programming is going to require a lot more staring for a lot longer just to make sure the code isn’t profoundly screwed up.
Sometimes, very rare but still, I can stare at the screen for the whole day and write zero lines of code. These rare days are the most demanding and the most stressful. Any monkey can “write code”, understanding the business logic of a complex application - that’s a very taxing mental work.
Tbh a good builder/technician will do this too when faced with a complicated fix
Same thing; every action has an opposite reaction, whether it’s code or physical engineering
I’m a carpenter, I do high end stuff for rich people with really expensive pieces of wood. I’ll stare as much as I need to on the issues I have or even before starting anything. Need to think about every way it could go wrong.
How do you prepare for “world ends in nuclear holocaust?” Seems a bit difficult to account for.
Cup of tea
Proof by ponder
I had a theoretical math professor. He said something along the lines of, “Being a theoretical math professor is the best job in the world. You can lean back in your chair, put your feet on your desk and close your eyes, and no one can tell if you’re working or having a nap.”
As a programmer we sometimes might look like we are not doing much from the outside but actually we’re dead inside thank you
ptogrammer, i think you mean
Shhh don’t tell my boss I’m a PTOgrammer 😎🍹
pardon his spelling… he was hiphotized!
common mistake, the t is actually silent
The p is silent.
