Skip to main content

Developer Lock-In, and Sleep Deprivation

I just happened to get trapped in a 12+ hour development lock-in to finish up on the GIS software my friends and I have been developing. For more than 12 hours we were kept in the dev room, and we were hacking on code we had written a couple of months back. Every aspect of the software was being scrutinized by everybody, and fixes were coded now and then so as to maximize the time that we were there.

We were fed gratituously and I cannot complain about the accomodations. Maybe we should have done this much earlier in the porject, not so that it could've been finished faster, but rather so that we could maximize the budget allowance for the food. And of course the air-conditioned workspace and well lit environment that turns night to day -- giving me the illusion that time stands still and that my body should not rest.

I should really start fixing my biological clock now, because this type of lifestyle isn't making me any more productive. The software, lacking documentation (for the user to see), should be documented ASAP. Here is where I found the value of code documentation and verbose descriptions. Even my fellow developer can now read through the code and figure out what it does and how to use it by just reading through the inline documentation.

And with my bio clock fixed (hopefully ASAP), then I should be more productive with my thesis especially now that I can work closer to home, and with exotic and powerful hardware.

Chilled.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Appreciating Rizal...

Nope, this is not an academic post. More of a reflective and wrote-because-i-was-enlightened type post. Anyway, I just passed a paper on Rizal's notion of a nation according to Quibuyen (a local writer who devoted a book -- A Nation Aborted -- on his treatise on Rizal). Chapter 6 was an interesting read, and a definite eye opener. Rizal all of a sudden became interesting, especially to someone like me who could care less. It seems that most of what Rizal aims for and wrote about is still evident in today's Philippines as I see it. I wonder why I didn't get to appreciate Rizal and his work when I was still in high school -- might be the fault of the high school and the curriculum, or might be because I was still considerably immature then. I wasn't able to understand most of Rizal's writings though even if I got to reading them basically because they translated from Spanish to Filipino/Tagalog. I don't have problems with Tagalog, until you put it in writing. I

From FOMO to JOMO

Until very recently I believed that I needed to be on top of the latest news and happenings not only in my field (computer science and software engineering) but also in as many things as I can be on top of. This meant subscribing to all sorts of magazines, newsletters, YouTube channels, Twitch streamers, watching TV and live sport events, etc. — I was on top of a lot of the latest happenings, trends, news, interesting developments. I was having fun and I felt busy. What I did not feel was particularly effective nor productive. I felt like I was consuming so much information with the thought that it might be useful someday. When I was younger this wouldn’t have been an issue but I realised that ever since I’ve started taking stock of what I’ve been spending my time on, that a lot of it I’ve been spending just staying on top of things that I really didn’t need to be on top of. This article is about some of the realisations I’ve made in the course of exploring this issue of “FOMO” or

Keeping a work log

I have been keeping a journal for my personal life with some regularity for the good part of 4 years. The difference between my earlier attempts at journaling before four years ago is the regularity and the structure. I started with a very structured and regimented journal (doing it everyday with prompts and blanks to fill), to a ruled journal notebook, then a plain notebook (no rules nor grids in the pages), and then settling on a dot-grid notebook. This allows me to doodle and write free-form to help me commit thoughts and observations of my day but it was mostly for archival and looking back to "feel good" or reminisce (also to sum up a month, a year, etc.) The approach helps a lot with self-improvement in terms of my mental health and my reflection to see where I was a specific amount of time ago and whenever I was reading it again. In a previous post I wrote about keeping a work log, and I realised I only mentioned that in passing. In this post I detail the structure of