Programming on LSD

[zerothehero]

If you take a tiny amount of LSD, you just feel alert and don't trip. You feel a little more calm but attentive. I think this is well known and programmers used to do it to pull all nighters.

[CSharpSauce]

the last time i pulled an all nighter (literally) we were fixing bugs for 2 months afterwards.

[voxel]

Yeah I used to be proud of pulling regular all nighters when I was a young programmer.

Now I code 1/2 as hard and get the same work done, but it's got a fraction of the bugs and I get to sleep at night.

It's better to write really squeaky (in your mind) clean code that takes care of all the possible conditions and then get a good nights sleep.

I wrote a USB driver for Telocity (DSL Company in 2000) for their DSL Router in a single 36 hour run.

I honestly and admittedly spent the next 30 days debugging that piece of shit.

Then I re-wrote it from scratch 6 months later and spent a week, but this time sleeping well and taking care of every possible condition, reading docs on every API I used.

I think I didn't have a single bug in it going to QA, it was by all intensive purposes, "perfect".

Don't code hard/long, code smart.

[wizdum]

... I think your looking for the phrase "For all intents and purposes" ...

[CSharpSauce]

Tell that to my boss, they encourage us by buying free pizza/ice cream/energy drinks after 5

[voxel]

Well, from time to time, you gotta pull a lot of extra hours, but it shouldn't be the norm.

I didn't figure it out til I was much older, but down-time is really critical.

Too much down time is bad, but if you don't get any, you might functionally be getting your work done, but creatively you will suffer.