[HN Gopher] John Carmack Work Habits
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John Carmack Work Habits
Author : markus_zhang
Score : 11 points
Date : 2021-03-08 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| markus_zhang wrote:
| Another random thought:
|
| - Since I have to get up at least once during the night for a
| diaper/milk run, I should cut off distractions that further
| reduce quality of sleep. I should leave cellphone in charger
| instead of under the pillow so that I don't spend half an hour
| every night after changing diapers for my boy playing State of
| Survivals (anyone else playing BTW?).
|
| - I should also increase a bit of physical activities as they
| improve the quality of sleep. But I hate them so much that it
| might be not doable. Actually I'm really not motivated to work
| out unless the doctor tells me to do it or die in the next 10
| years. Crossed out as a non-option.
|
| - With a family it's really difficult to go for any programming
| retreat. But at least I think I can arrange some shorter ones so
| that my wife doesn't complain too much after my boy goes to
| daycare. More importantly, I need to increase my programming
| skills (so far a bit better than zero) to the level that
| programming retreats actually make sense. For example, if I have
| to check references every 5 mins I'd better live with Internet. I
| probably need another 1,000 to 2,000 hours of programming to be
| real familiar to get anything positive from programming retreats.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| To save anyone a click, these are from a Joe Rogan interview.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think everyone has a different work habits, but here are the
| takeaways (assuming all bulletpoints are close to fact):
|
| - I really like the retreat idea. Carmack frequently did that
| since his early days. In "Masters of Doom", IIRC, he started
| doing this kind of programming retreats since as early as his
| Quake II days. The key is to have a project in mind (in his case
| it was usually a rendering technique) and take one or two weeks
| to be super focused on it.
|
| - That 13-hour work day make sense somehow, as he only programmed
| 50% of the time. The difficulty is to be that focused every day.
|
| - Most people actually don't get good sleeps and this probably
| puts a huge debuff on them. They not only lose productivity, but
| also miss the chance to reach proper level of productivity. I
| don't know how to fix it, especially now that I have a 5-month
| kid.
| wussboy wrote:
| My two children wrecked my sleep for 5 years. You sort of get
| used to it. Only now, 10 years later am I starting to get my
| sleep back to a reasonable, non-panicked amount.
|
| So, "how to fix it" in my opinion is to just outlive it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Agreed! There is nothing can be done anyway. My wife is
| taking the major burden so I might actually spend more time
| awaken during the night to replace her as the night guardian.
|
| I also heard that boys need more time with father so I'm
| expecting more time spent outside of programming (programming
| is one of my hobbies, not a job requirement) when he grows
| up.
|
| The good part about parenting is that I'm forced to be more
| productive at anything. Making calls to hostipal/government?
| Sure I'm going to do that NOW, not tomorrow, not 5 minutes
| later. Need to look at Kafka tool and do some development
| about the logs? Sure I'm going to do that NOW, not going to
| leave until the deadline hits. Because if I don't wrap up
| things NOW, I might end up forgetting to do them now that my
| boy has taken up a large part of my attention.
| Bluestein wrote:
| (Also, this poignant comment from somebody in the thread, about
| dreams and code ...
|
| "Last night I had a dream I was an initialized object in C++. It
| was terrifying. I felt...trapped. Pure quietness. It was dark
| except for a glowing yellow light far into the distance. Almost
| like a small star in the sky. It was the unused variable warning
| from the user's IDE. Then it goes out. I'm still alive. They
| forgot to free me. I'm just lost memory. Taken up space until the
| machine shuts off. Then I'm gone forever.")
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah it's fun to read about that :)
|
| Haha he must have gone through some memory management
| sessions...
| Bluestein wrote:
| Stuff nightmares are made of: "Woke up in a sweat, I got
| GC'd!" ... ouch.-
|
| Were it to be Rust, at least, I'd guess you'd know - death
| sentence style - what is to happen to you :)
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