I also love midnight coding, though sometimes it extends to 4am coding and I am not so happy the other day when I check out the code I wrote at 4am :P I’m truly happy for folks if they enjoy coding so much they want to do it for fun/as a hobby in their non day-job hours, but I think positioning one’s hobby (when it happens to coincide with one’s profession) as somehow obligatory if you care about improving/success (“if you don’t care about improving yourself then you’ll never actually succeed”) is wrong. Hey!.. Instead that time was consumed thinking about some other task or, usually, replaced with anxiety over not getting any side project work done. I am now 65 years old and have been working on an application I first started working on in 1978 before most of you guys were born. ;). I was immediately struck by how accurately you described the problem. That’s a saying I keep telling myself as I try and do what your article suggests. but I have to get my coding in later” and have that be understood and taken into consideration. I am now in partnership with one of my oldest customers and work for his business about 45 hours a week, modifying and supporting my app for his company and also supporting our other clients. I got a 35 days streak, took two days off, and now continue with a new streak. I’m actually starting off a similar project, came up with it last week: the 30 days of Git Commits; however, I like your 20 weeks better. Outward perception. Try writing a failing test to indicate where you left off and where to start tomorrow. September 5, 2019 by Tamara Pridgett. http://ajlopez.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/always-be-coding/. Those are the parts I need to improve the most, but I fully agree with the post and the advantages of writing code every day. Great! I need to either be *really* confident I’d find just the doing itself worthwhile (e.g., using fun CS or expanding my limits somehow) or I have a rational hope that my work could actually help the world in some really miniscule way. This is actually kind of depressing, and leaves me wishing I had set aside more time during my trip to do a little bit of coding each day. This is how long you really have to make a decision after receiving a job offer Published Wed, Oct 25 2017 2:12 PM EDT Updated Wed, Oct 25 2017 2:12 PM EDT Marguerite Ward @forwardist About us: Career Karma is a platform designed to help job seekers find, research, and connect with job training programs to advance their careers. If you are feeling anxiety about not spending your free time coding, STOP. That is what I’m working on… I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime I’ll do all that I can to recommend this tactic to others who wish to get substantial side project work done. Only value the minutes you spend physically typing. For example if you work or study during the day, you could try programming … You should always audit your code and see if you could write it in a more effective way. So how did you get into the habit of it? If I was scheduled to go out in the evening, and not get back until late, then I would need to work on my side project early in the day, before starting my main Khan Academy work. Not to mention if you miss a weekend you end up with a two week gap as a result. “I should note that I’ve been finding that I have less time to spend on hobbies (such as woodblock printing) but that’s a reasonable tradeoff that I’ll need to live with.”, Great. Although I finished the program recently I am keeping up that practice as well as working on my real project, a new startup for social video. It can take up the whole hour I’ve set aside in the early morning for my side projects. This is one of the best posts I have seen in a long time! Many commenters on this post mention “anxiety” and worry about their supposed lack of commitment. If you are in a relationship then you are doing yourself and your partner disservice. I loved the commit chart. That’s not so much the case now – and that’s a good thing. Those are astounding […] This is a strategy that does not work well for me, as it turns out. By now, you've probably already heard that sitting all day is bad for you, but exactly how many hours of sitting may be too much? I also forced myself to code everyday (weekends included) and developed the habit of doing at least a couple hours first thing in the morning. Perhaps this just means writing ideas down on paper on a daily basis, or asking people around me what they think of the latest UI in my app – stuff like this will hopefully help to keep it all fresh in my head. What about your paid job? It was an intense period of two months of pre-course work (18 Code School classes and a bunch of coding assignments), followed by three months of intense work on site where we went 11+ hours a day for 6 days a week. I was rarely able to complete all the work that I wanted and it forced me to reject other weekend activities that I enjoyed (eating dim sum, visiting museums, going to the park, spending time with my partner, etc.) — … Living longer and healthier and spending time with the people I care about is far more important than the side projects. I’m definitely going to implement some of your ideas going forward. I’m trying to follow this practice these days. If someone had said that to me on day 1 that I would actually write 100,000 words I would have seemed unimaginable, but it adds up. http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem, http://renewlifebalance.com/?/monthly-goals/, http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22778322, http://hacksnsnacks.com/hacks/theres-always-room-for-jell-o/. http://codeforces.com/profile/jhtan That’s my story (the problem part). I’ve been endured the same feeling when I couldn’t get some of my side projects done as I hoped. Very nice read, it’s interesting to see how similar lives of programmers might be :). But if you’re not yet in the habit of writing on a regular basis, 1,000 words may well be too much. For you, John. Accounting for days off, this equates to two months or three months time. Plus, you always see the immediate effect of your code, not because of continuous deployments, but usually because of the magnitude of worth your code brings to the table. I fucking love this article!!! With information overload, we just forget we are humans not computers and try to do a lot of things which backfires instead. Antonin: Where do you work? I’m definitely going to work on a framework like this for myself. Limiting your naps to 10 to 20 minutes can leave you feeling more alert and refreshed. Also, I’d like to add a link to your post in a recent article I wrote around this topic (http://hacksnsnacks.com/hacks/theres-always-room-for-jell-o/). 4 min/chart or 120/day outpatient and ER records. Some week days I work a little bit more (usually no more than an hour) and on weekends I’m sometimes able to work a full day. I think that if you/they really care about and want to complete side projects, then your strategy is probably a good one, but I wouldn’t position it (and blog about it) to perpetuate the idea that being successful in programming means sacrificing your nights and weekends for side projects. Thus when I go for a walk, or take a shower, or any of the other non-brain-using activities I participate in, I’m thinking about what I’m going to be coding later and finding a good way to solve that problem. I’m actually testing this strategy for competitive programming. Few months ago I worked on my side projects only the weekend, not making substantial progress, giving my girlfriend hard times when she planned something else, always ending up disappointed because I didn’t achieved everything that I had planned. Very, very, very inspiring. Nice points on how to keep the streak continuing. 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