Comment Love it and Leave. (Score 1) 153
Only three comments I can give are:
1) Make sure that programming is really what you love doing, and not just what you do for money. I consider programming to be like what I would imagine, (perhaps incorrectly since Im not one) playing music would be like to a true musician- something he or she just does, and would do whether or not they were being paid to do it. I just like the physical act of just pounding out a good set of code and even when Im doing stuff that I dont like, usually its the situaton, (e.g. tracking and fixing a really nasty bug, fixing OPP's (other people's problems), working with a crappy API that I hate and didn't have any input in choosing) and not the coding itself that makes me want to stop or gets me bored. And usually even in those situations its easy to psych myself into remaining focused by reminding myself that the faster and better I do it, the less time Ill have to spend on it or looking at it.
2)Leave home and go somewhere else to work. Even when Im working for a large corporation that allows me to work from home, I tend to find that Im a lot more productive if I leave my living space, (with all its distractions), and head to a good cafe, (a bit grungy, with free internet access of course, lots of outlets and a good cup of cappucinno). I usually find that after Ive been going there for awhile I, like Norm, even have a favorite table (close to the bathroom but out of the main foot traffic throughfare) and once I'm there then its really easy to zone out for 4 hours at a stretch and get some good coding in. I even find that the background noise helps get my creative juices flowing. After 4 hours I usually stop and walk around outside or talk on my cell for awhile, but after that its easy to get back to work. Sometimes I split the 8 hours between home and a cafe, but I find that if I just stay home, after about 4 hours then the temptation of too many other things to do at home is too great to resist.
3)Along with your programming books keep a copy of "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck or "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair or "Oliver Twist" by Dickens or something by Steinbeck or any book that has a grim enough description about some type of physical manual labor. I flip through these from time to time and then after I compare what type of work I *could* be doing if I was unfortunate enough to have arrived on this planet in a different time, or out of a different portal, and how incredibly lucky I am to be able to actually sit in a climate controlled environment and get paid, well, for just pressing some keys and spewing out some garbled text, then the guilt and gratitude usually makes it very easy to stop fooling around and get my butt back to work.
1) Make sure that programming is really what you love doing, and not just what you do for money. I consider programming to be like what I would imagine, (perhaps incorrectly since Im not one) playing music would be like to a true musician- something he or she just does, and would do whether or not they were being paid to do it. I just like the physical act of just pounding out a good set of code and even when Im doing stuff that I dont like, usually its the situaton, (e.g. tracking and fixing a really nasty bug, fixing OPP's (other people's problems), working with a crappy API that I hate and didn't have any input in choosing) and not the coding itself that makes me want to stop or gets me bored. And usually even in those situations its easy to psych myself into remaining focused by reminding myself that the faster and better I do it, the less time Ill have to spend on it or looking at it.
2)Leave home and go somewhere else to work. Even when Im working for a large corporation that allows me to work from home, I tend to find that Im a lot more productive if I leave my living space, (with all its distractions), and head to a good cafe, (a bit grungy, with free internet access of course, lots of outlets and a good cup of cappucinno). I usually find that after Ive been going there for awhile I, like Norm, even have a favorite table (close to the bathroom but out of the main foot traffic throughfare) and once I'm there then its really easy to zone out for 4 hours at a stretch and get some good coding in. I even find that the background noise helps get my creative juices flowing. After 4 hours I usually stop and walk around outside or talk on my cell for awhile, but after that its easy to get back to work. Sometimes I split the 8 hours between home and a cafe, but I find that if I just stay home, after about 4 hours then the temptation of too many other things to do at home is too great to resist.
3)Along with your programming books keep a copy of "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck or "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair or "Oliver Twist" by Dickens or something by Steinbeck or any book that has a grim enough description about some type of physical manual labor. I flip through these from time to time and then after I compare what type of work I *could* be doing if I was unfortunate enough to have arrived on this planet in a different time, or out of a different portal, and how incredibly lucky I am to be able to actually sit in a climate controlled environment and get paid, well, for just pressing some keys and spewing out some garbled text, then the guilt and gratitude usually makes it very easy to stop fooling around and get my butt back to work.
