Monday, August 8, 2005

Have you ever seen the sun rise ... twice in a row ... three times...?

Paul Graham recently had a very interesting article about what businesses can learn from open source.

The entire piece was very well written, and the author makes a lot of good points, but what captured my imagination the most was the part about the optimal working environment for a programmer. Paul says that people working in the comfortable surroundings of their own home are often exponentially more productive than corporate rats in a stuffy cubicle farm. Based on my own personal experience, I would certainly agree. I find I do my best work in marathon sessions, often involving massive amounts of caffeine and highly irregular sleep patterns. I understand many programmers share similar experiences. Once I get 'in the zone,' as they say, I will work solidly for hours on end paying little attention to time or the world around me. Were I restricted to a structured work environment constantly struggling against interruptions and distractions like co-workers, meetings and email, I fear my programming would suffer.

I am currently working hard to finish up the next release of JWords, as well as the initial release of another semantic analysis tool. I've been trying to complete this stuff for weeks now, but I find the only way I can get anything done is if I rush straight home from work and devote the entire evening to programming. If I decide to go workout, play basketball, see a movie or go out to dinner, and try to pick up where I left off and program a little bit at a time, I never get anything done. By the time I sit down and get going, its time to sign off for the night. My old friend the all-nighter is no longer an option with my responsibilities at work. Usually weekends offer a real chance to get down to business, but I'm afraid my willpower is just barely too weak to resist the temptation of living it up at the beach. But on those rare occasions when I can devote a significant amount of time to this endeavor, and everything is firing on all cylinders, nothing else compares.

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