No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn February 28, 2007

I’ve only slept 3.5 hours out of the last 60. That’s probably not good, right? I am so tired, that I am now not even tired anymore. I am just in a state of permanent zombie. Coding in this state is another thing altogether. I do not recommend it. I do not recommend over bidding all kinds of work because you think you aren’t going to get it all — Murphy’s law says you will get it all, and then you’ll spend two months trying to dig through the avalanche of work you have to complete. The side effect is you make good money, and you don’t spend much money, because you are always working. Another issue is that people don’t understand what you mean when they ask you “so, what have you been doing?” and you respond “working.” Normal people work 40 hours per week, hate their jobs, and go home to do the things they are really interested in.

That’s the problem with programming. I’m interested in it. I don’t just stop coding, reading and learning about programming because the workday ends. If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely that you have the same problem that I do. Have you ever read your way to the bottom of the programming.reddit.com page, and then thought to yourself “crap, now I have to wait until tomorrow to read more.” I’ve never programmed in Haskell (even for fun) and I have read at least 5 articles on monads. Don’t even get me started on currying, or y-combinators — I’m reading that stuff everyday.

Thing is, I think everybody else is slacking. The truly driven people don’t really need to be even exceptional at what they do because everybody else is so poor at it.