Q: What's a "muscle memory"?

A: It's when you open up devRant, skim through several posts, get bored, decide to visit some other website for more stimulation, close the tab with devRant, open a new tab and your hands type in devrant.com [ENTER] before you know it

I think I've reached a new level of procrastination, where I write the whole program in a comment in pseudocode instead of actually writing it in a programming language.

Procrastination

You guys are not ranting enough for me to doomscroll away my miseries here.

How bad has YouTube consumed you ranters? What do you burn those hours on?

Post yours.
YouTube > profile > time watched

I seriously cannot stress how important it is to build good reliable tests. Especially regression testing.

I am crying inside over the amount of time I've lost in my integration hell.

Seriously stupid shit that should have been tested but never did because I was too fucking lazy. Don't be me. Don't put yourself in the hell I'm in. Be better.

I mean, impossible for who? For someone working 9-5 without procrastination, sure there are.
I have been a student and a procrastinator most of my life, so yeah, a 40 hour week's work is possible in two days with minimum sleep.
Also done massive projects in a week's time. If you know what you're doing, it's not that impossible.

Although, I find working with others almost impossible in some occasions, specially where you don't see eye to eye despite however much you try. (time-wise, speaking)

Testing every little class and stateless function is a brilliant way to spend a lot of time doing nothing.

At the same time, if I didn't have to test it, I probably wouldn't have turned it into tiny classes and mostly stateless functions.

I often struggle with procrastination, finding myself getting lost in TikTok and YouTube shorts for hours on end or even staying in bed doing nothing, even when I have important deadlines to meet.

Have you attempted to overcome procrastination before? If so, what approaches have you found effective, and which have not worked for you?

Deliberate and fully conscious procrastination. Distract yourself deliberately every few hours. Do something completely different in your free time and when procrastinating.

Also, take your time, think things through.

When debugging obvious typos and "impossible" causalities that you still not see after reparsing the code the tenths time - calm down, procrastinate a bit, and restart debugging - discarding assumptions and result from the previous tries.

How do you manage your time after works for your side projects?

These days I'm being a victim of random frequent procrastination after office works.

Me in the beginning thinking programming is all fun and games. I think that's what holds a lot a new programmers back. This can lead to over thinking and even procrastination.

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market