I Found This Pretty Interesting, So Posting The Article , Have a Look & Njoy Coding
And
sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and
there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some
earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some
work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am.
At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special about the night?
I think it boils down to three things: the maker’s schedule, the sleepy brain and bright computer screens.
The maker’s schedule
Paul Graham wrote about the maker’s schedule in
2009 – basically that there are two types of schedules in this world
(primarily?). The traditional manager’s schedule where your day is cut
up into hours and a ten minute distraction costs you, at most, an hour’s
worth of time.
Image via Wikipedia
On
the other hand you have something PG calls the maker’s schedule – a
schedule for those of us who produce stuff. Working on large abstract
systems involves fitting the whole thing into your mind – somebody once
likened this to constructing a house out of expensive crystal glassand as soon as someone distracts you, it all comes barreling down and shatters into a thousand pieces.
This is why programmers are so annoyed when you distract them.
Because
of this huge mental investment, we simply can’t start working until we
can expect a couple of hours without being distracted. It’s just not
worth constructing the whole model in your head and then having it torn
down half an hour later.
In
fact, talking to a lot of founders you’ll find out they feel like they
simply can’t get any work done during the day. The constant barrage of
interruptions, important stuff ™ to tend to and emails to answer simply
don’t allow it. So they get most of their “work work” done during the
night when everyone else is sleeping.
The sleepy brain
But
even programmers should be sleeping at night. We are not some race of
super humans. Even programmers feel more alert during the day.
Ballmer's peak
Why
then do we perform our most mentally complex work work when the brain
wants to sleep and we do simpler tasks when our brain is at its sharpest
and brightest?
Because being tired makes us better coders.
Similar to the ballmer peak, being tired can make us focus better simply because when your brain is tired it has to focus! There isn’t enough left-over brainpower to afford losing concentration.
I seem to get the least work done right after drinking too much tea or having a poorly timed energy drink.
Makes me hyperactive and one second I’m checking twitter, the next I’m
looking at hacker news and I just seem to be buzzing all over the
place..
You’d
think I’d work better – so much energy, so much infinite overclocked
brainpower. But instead I keep tripping over myself because I can’t
focus for more than two seconds at a time.
Conversely, when I’m slightly tired, I just plomp my arse down and code.
With a slightly tired brain I can code for hours and hours without even
thinking about checking twitter or facebook. It’s like the internet
stops existing.
I
feel like this holds true for most programmers out there. We have too
much brainpower for ~80% of the tasks we work on – face it, writing that
one juicy algorithm, requires ten times as much code to produce an
environment in which it can run. Even if you’re doing the most advanced
machine learning (or something) imaginable, a lot of the work is simply
cleaning up the data and presenting results in a lovely manner.
And
when your brain isn’t working at full capacity it looks for something
to do. Being tired makes you dumb enough that the task at hand is
enough.
Bright computer screens
This one is pretty simple. Keep staring at a bright source of light in the evening and your sleep cyclegets
delayed. You forget to be tired until 3am. Then you wake up at 11am and
when the evening rolls around you simply aren’t tired because hey,
you’ve only been up since 11am!
Image via Wikipedia
Given
enough iterations this can essentially drag you into a different
timezone. What’s more interesting is that it doesn’t seem to keep
rolling, once you get into that equilibrium of going to bed between 3am
and 4am you tend to stay there.
Or maybe that’s just the alarm clocks doing their thing because society tells us we’re dirty dirty slobs if we have breakfast at 2pm.
Fin
To
conclude, programmers work at night because it doesn’t impose a time
limit on when you have to stop working, which gives you a more relaxed
approach, your brain doesn’t keep looking for distractions and a bright
screen keeps you awake.
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