For those of us who got the coding-fever, the day doesn’t have enough hours. Twenty four is just not enough. How many times do we find ourselves mumbling to the computer at 04:00 AM, sitting there undecided between the angel that says It’s way past bedtime and soon you have to wake up to go to work and the little imp that says Give it another five minutes, you know it’s almost there…

Give or take, I think I need five to six hours of sleep every day and the occasional ten hours of sleep pit stop every second week. After subtracting time for commuting, eating, showers and other similar activities you can’t do without until technology is advanced enough to eliminate those with a push of a button, we’re left with an average of eleven to twelve hours a day to dedicate to the things we want to be doing.

Usually, if I get eight to ten hours of coding a day - this includes writing code, or talking about it - I go to sleep rather satisfied. Less than that and it’s like something is not right.

On my previous project, we had to work 12 hour days, so I’d go back to the hotel relatively tired, my code tank filled to the top and would usually not work on my non-related-to-work projects that much. The nights we wouldn’t meet up for dinner or drinks I’d post the occasional article.

Most of the time, we worked four days a week. But blogging at nights must’ve gotten me in blogging mode, because when I woke up on Fridays, I had already thought of something I wanted to blog about and blog I did.

Can you see what was happening there? I blogged instead of coding.

I’m back in London now, working on a project with a schedule that falls on the nine-to-five side of things. I get to go home on time, do the High Voltage Rock thing for a couple of hours and then get back to the iBook for some coding.

Even though I have seemingly more free time and although I do have things I want to blog about, lately, I always end up coding instead.

Given that we have a finite number of hours each day, blogging is counter productive to coding and vice versa.

Yes, you can probably balance the two, but things are usually more complicated than that. Starting something and actually completing it in a way that leaves you satisfied is kind of a full time activity.

Most of the time, it’ll come down to a conscious choice between the blog and the code. And if had to make that choice, I think I’d go with the latter.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.