*walks to the kitchen at work to get a glass of water*
*walks back and continues debugging an issue*
*starts drinking from the glass*
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
*noticing that I never actually filled the glass*

😐

That "in the zone" moment 😆

Son of a bitch!

Bored on a weekend i decided to write a html5 canvas game, got into the zone and a couple of hours later I was done and figured I should out it online. Then I realised my Wi-Fi was off and I had written the entire thing without Google.

Do not disturb someone especially if they are in the zone.

Hint : earphones on, a ton of error logs on screen.

such code
much wow

Me, in the zone, staring at the code. Co-worker enters.
Co: hey, can you...
Me (not really listening): no.
Co: it's just...
Me: no.
Co: later?
Me: no.
Co: but...
Me: no.
Co: (leaving)

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in, whatever music that your mood requires at the time (my taste varies from classical to country to blues to jazz, pop, rock, metal and even heavy metal (growls) at times).

libre.fm is a good source for non-redundant music. The community channel is actually very good. (even though some crap do creep in every once in a while)

If you can zone out the noise around you, have a coffee machine within your chair's (assuming it has wheels) roll-range - you're all good.

PS : There's one problem that you can never rule out - interruptions from people around you, for that, you make a list of predefined answers :

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

I spent about 5 hours today coding and I was totally in the zone. I'm talking things were working properly, tests were passing, bugs were being squashed all over the place. It was completely amazing, I felt like a god ruling over my code kingdom.

After about 5 straight hours I realized that I needed food so I got up, stretched my legs and had some dinner. Well I sat back down about an hour ago and I am SO far out of the zone. Everything is breaking, I can't focus and I have no idea why. My kingdom was overrun with a plague of bugs in just the short time I paused to eat.

Moral of the story: when you get in the zone don't stop for anything even if it seems like basic human necessity. After all we aren't human when we're in the zone, we are coding gods.

The Zone. When its just you, the problem, and the code.

I love my wife, i really do. But seriously.... STOP PULLING ME OUT OF THE ZONE for every tiny thing!

She:
"... can you make me a coffee"

Me:
"sure babe"

What i actually want to say:
"Its a fucking one button machine, do it yourself you lazy shit. And it takes me half an hour to go back this deep! Isnt it enough that i did all house chores made you dinner and took the dog out after working for 8 hours streight. You better give me some attention later tonight, since you should have more then enough power after sleeping all day! If i would at least get a compliment... GIVE ME COMPIMENTS."

I was totally in the zone earlier.

Plenty of caffeine, plenty of anger thanks to idiots, rocking out to Amon Amarth and Disturbed, and chewing through a difficult logic problem. It was wonderful.

Then.

Then there was a mandatory all-hands meeting. A mandatory meeting entirely consisting of someone doing a (admittedly decent) presentation on very basic marketing. (Basic as in "This is what ROI is." 🙄) It lasted for about 40 minutes, totally killing my zone and butchering my productivity. I've barely gotten anything done the rest of the day, thanks to that.

On the bright side, I worked out the logic on stickies during the talky-people bits. Maybe I'll be able to write it tomorrow.

When you're in the zone you're in the zone

Sometimes when I code, I plug in my earphones and listen to music, focused, in zone.

* I let everyone think that.
** I actually don't listen to anything.
*** Keeps the buggers away!

We called it "Project Hindenburg".

A huge planning and logistics app with hundreds of screens and dozens of interwoven subfunctions, suddenly needed to be able to support multiple time zones. Our project was to retrofit every area that touched on dates or times, to allow the user to specify, and work in, any time zone.

At this point in the story I can tell whether you have had to work with time zones in code. People who haven't are butting in with something that begins, "that should be fairly simple, you just need to..." followed by some irrelevant noise that betrays their ignorance.

People who have worked with time zones are nodding in shared pain, like fellow attendees of a survivors meeting.

You see, programmers tend to think of time zones as arithmetic; in reality, they are confusing, ambiguous, chaotic, and individual. You can't translate everything into a central time zone (eg UTC) because you lose the user's intent. For example, if you schedule a meeting for 3pm and then move it to the next day, you want it at 3pm even if the clocks have changed.

Project Hindenburg ended up using the entire development staff of the company for well over a year. It smashed our release projections to rubble, made an already tangled code base completely unmaintainable, introduced mind-bending edge case bugs that reduced staff across the company to tears (literally), and led to most of the mid-level and senior developers eventually quitting (including me).

I am @fuckfuckityfuck, and that was the story of Project Hindenburg.

“Your time zone is not my concern” - manager of the backend team

I asked if there’s another way for us to get test data into QA. That doesn’t involve us staying on until 9pm to get a backend dev to modify the db manually, everyday.

Always put yourself out of your comfort zone. Always. It's the main source of both anxiety and personal growth. Don't think that you're a fraud because you can't understand the new stuff right away, how else would you learn? Looking back you should always be impressed on how much you've covered, but still have anxiety of what's to come.

How I've got my previous job?
Imagine you are in a wild techno club. Dark aisles, A dj from berlin behind the turntables blasting out hard beats, couples kissing on extasy pills.

And there was a friend I've didn't meet in ages. "how do you do?" she asks. "ah... you know i'm on a job hunt for a year i feel misrable". "really? my dad is looking for somebody, send him your resNZNZNZ!" "WHAT? can't hear you!" "Send him your resume!" "Ahhh! okay great!"

So on 24. december 5pm, snow outside, i've sat on wooden table in the kitchen of her father discussing the conditions for the job. It was the start of a crazy time. Dining with millionaires on their Castles. Shaking hands with top businesses leaders. Going to China and having dinner with the 500 richest chinese at once. Wild!

so my advice for you nerds, don't stay in your comfort zone behind the screen on weekends. Vistit a techno club sometimes. You may find a pretty girl/boy with a CEO as a father.

The next time you see developers wearing headphones, please understand that it's our most polite of saying:

"I'm in the freaking 'zone'. Don't you dare disturb my rhythm in coding and lose my momentum. Now unless it's reaaally that important, leave it in our group chat/email and I'll read it later."

Tap gently. We're at overdrive when we headbang to music while coding.

So this bunch of idiots made this huge iOS app using lots of global variables, lots of spaghetti code and basically no separation between logic and UI.
Another bunch of idiots were told to take that iOS app and basically port it to Android. And they ported that same code mess, almost line by line, and adding some weird shit.
Now the HQ of the first bunch of idiots realize that the second bunch of idiots were too slow/inefficient/whatever, and they're now asking US to solve that Android mess and add another shitload of features.
The worst part of it, is that both bunches of idiots are still working on it, so we're basically forced to follow the same shitty style until the first deadline, otherwise we'd die suffocated by stinky merge conflicts. Which will happen anyway because our changes are going to overlap.
Oh, and the PM refuses to understand the disaster coming and there's six hours of time zone difference.

Fuck this shit.

“No we don’t use the time zone info you send on each request. We get all the drivers for the store ID, choose one of them randomly and take their time zone. We have been assuming it will always be the same for all drivers for each store.”

This is my new favorite response to a Jira ticket in this company.

I may have to print it out and hang it on my desk

I contantly keep forgetting to turn on my music. It's like:
*open youtube*
"Wait let me just do this thing real quick"
*alt-tab to ide, start coding*
*get in the zone, coding intensifies*
3 hours later...
"Oh yeah let's turn on some music"
Rinse and repeat...

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

When I am in the zone and someone disturbs me

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

* How other sites charge for a domain name
- The domain (abc.com) is available
---- Price => $14

* How AWS charges
- Your domain (abc.com) is available
--- Domain name => $18.99
--- DNS resolution => $17.88
--- Hosted zone (1) => $10.97
--- Route53 Interface => $45.67
--- Network ACL => $63.90
--- Security Group => $199.78
--- NAT Gateway (1) => $78.99
--- IP linking => $120.89
--- Peer Connection => $67.00
--- Reverve Endpoint => $120.44
--- DNS Propagation => $87.00
--- Egress Gateway => $98.34
--- DNS Queries (1m) => $0.40
--------------------------------
---- TOTAL => $2903.99
(Pay for what you use... learn more)
--------------------------------

SHOUT OUT TO ALL FELLOW DEVELOPERS

It's been 4 days now, I haven't wrote a single line of code. Trying to get in the zone but I don't feel like coding.

Any Suggestions? Please help.

Task: A mobile Application in less than an hour

- Headphones [x]
- Zone Music [x]
- Fan [x]
- Linux [x]
- VSCode [x]
- Terminal [x]

Now, let's get into the zone

100% focused, balls-deep in the zone, not sure I could have recalled my own name if you'd asked me...
Suddenly out of nowhere, someone's asking me about a job I worked on over a week ago. I'm mostly answering in just a few syllables, struggling to surface from 20 layers of Call Stack.
This goes on for a full 5 minutes before they say, "sorry were you busy?"
No, I was just about to beat Solitaire.
Of course I was fucking busy jesus fucking christ, did you not see all that code and shit on my fucking screen when you suddenly and urgently had to disturb me?

You know you're in the zone when you're working on your laptop on the train and you miss your station and the two after that.
Your commute card are missing two zones and you get off with a stern warning instead of paying the penalty of travelling without a ticket...
#Developersdisease

When you are in the zone.

I’ve pretty bad ADHD (diagnosed) my entire adult life, so focus has been a huge struggle for me forever. Here’s my strategy:
- Noise-canceling headphones blasting chiptunes (Spotify has some, but YouTube has the best selection of old-school video game music) I’m usually way less distracted if I listen to music without lyrics.
- A chair cushion (I actually use one of those ridiculous donut ones, but I put a normal sized pillowcase on it. SO comfortable, even after many hours.)
- THE POMODORO METHOD. 25 minutes hardcore coding/debugging, followed by 5 minute intervals for breaks, like checking fb, etc. (Breaks are totally optional if you’re in the zone tho 💪) It’s a great way to reward your brain for focusing.
- And if all else fails, the looming threat of unemployment is always there to keep you motivated 🙃 (Sad but true— always crosses my mind when I’m starting to fall behind on a task)

For most developers, the browser history is a no go zone ;-)

Whoever invented glossy screens for laptops should be shot! I can't get in the zone for coding while staring into a freaking mirror!!

I don't always listen to music while coding, but when I do, it's because things are absolutely unmitigably fucked and it's going to take some herculean effort to unfuck it.

I have this thing I've done for more years than my kids have been alive when shit really hits the fan and I need to show the staff the old lady can still lay waste.

Step 1: put on "the playlist," which consists of only the most aggressive 90s marilyn manson songs.*
Step 2: put on the headphones, which are noise cancelling and super bassy
Step 3: pound a monster (blue, obv)
Step 4: get super manic
Step 5: get in the zone and destroy several features or a flotilla of bugs in a single night
Step N: make absolute fucking magic
Step N+1: call in sick the next day and sleep til noon

What's your hero process?

*Content has less to do with it than the headspace I've come to associate with it and the fact I can't get drowsy with the constant aggression.

My country just changed its time zone from UTC+3 to UTC+2.
Now I have to change the server to handle requests correctly!
PS. Probably tomorrow will be a big chaos for everyone!

PM had a bad habit of breaking me out of my zone so I had a talk about what that means.

I explained the idea behind how interruptions can cost productivity. He seemed to get it, or so thought. Said he'd message me as to not break the zone. Good good!

He messages me with a question, then walks over to ask if the message broke my zone.

🤔

oh man... I just spent 12 hours in the zone and made what was originally meant to be made by 4 developers in close to two weeks(coding in free time)

Aaand I also drank too much coffee...

And I've done it in Node.js which I basically never used before :D ...I applied my coding standards and habits that I use when writing Java and it went like butter... ES2015 is pretty ok actually 😊

Worst: The guy gave me 5 minutes to code a given assignment on paper. I did all the logic and told him I was missing a function whose name I would just Google. He told me I can't always Google. Well... I won't be coding on paper either.

Best: I was given the assignment to clone a part of a production site. Assignment was intended for 3 days and I was given 5 hours. Completition wasn't important, only structure and coding style counted. I cloned everything and even added new features.

You just can't always be in the zone. I hope more interviewers would take that into account and design better questions.

Hey!
I'm new to devRant
I did not thought that there would be any community where people would speak a programmer's language (read humour) and would be so supportive and encouraging about almost anything. reddit is too informal and stackoverflow, too formal. devRant falls in the Goldilocks zone for programmers. Feels just right!
Thank You for making it so awesome!

Just got a call about a site I made fo someone being down. It's 3am on a Monday morning. I have school in 6 hours. My client knows this. Go fuck yourself I'm not getting out of bed at 3 in the morning.

Note: we live in the same time zone.

I just got memo/warning for swearing too much.

Should i submit my resignation now?

Just to be clear, im not swearing AT someone. You guys know how it is when we're in the zone. Headphones on, focus intensifies, errors encountered, a lot of shits and fucks are uttered, most of the time shouted.

You have a question.
You google it; nothing comes up.
You read the documentation; no good.
You ask it on stackoverflow; no answer.

You are in... The Twilight Zone

For the love of buggery, stop watching bloody videos on your bloody phone with the bloody volume turned up.

I was thinking about something, just starting to get in the zone, when suddenly that tinny little speaker opened up a portal into the howling chaos of the underworld.

It sounds like cats fucking in an empty grain silo.

For the next half an hour, there is no room in my head for anything apart from the diabolical echoes of that bollock-wrenchingly hideous noise.

To the people talking about boats on the other side of the cubical wall, FUCK YOU! YOU HAVE BEEN TALKING FOR 45 MINUTES! DO YOU WORK? I HOPE YOUR BOATS ALL GET RUST. I worked 12 hours on Sunday, got 4 hours of sleep, pulling a full day, then depending on how much work I get done work all night again. RESPECT MY QUIET ZONE!!! Uncouth peasants!

The real question is, how do I get out of the ultimate coding zone?! 😅

That moment when you come out of your zone & discover you neither had breakfast or lunch and the playlist has stopped hours ago!

When you skip breakfast because you're running late, forget to go to lunch because you're in the zone, go home, work on your latest personal project and now it's 10 pm and you realize you have nothing to eat at home, so you have to rush half across town to the only supermarket that's still open...

Time flies, one minute you're starting a project at 11PM and finally​ ready to sleep...at 5.45AM

You know that feeling when you're "on the zone"

The worst part about being totally in the zone: looking up after a hour or five and realizing you really really really really need to pee. And knowing that as soon as you get up it’s all over. 😭

Got the ideal job right now. Over market salary. 100% remote. Mornings to myself until the rest of the team in another time zone comes online. Working within my competency with just enough challenge to make it interesting. Free products for being an employee. Only wish it came with paid health insurance but I do get a partial reimbursement.

I worked for months staying up till 3am almost every night in order to collaborate with a team on another time zone. No one ever praised me or thanked me or gave me a pat.

Yesterday two members of that team stayed up till 2am once for the first time in their lives to make a release. They got immediately labelled as the most dedicated employees.

Okay, sounds fair.

It happens... but sometimes you have to, to get to the next level. It's called stepping out of your safe zone.

Somewhere in a lonely break room
There's a guy starting to realize that eternal hell has been unleashed unto him.
It's two a.m.

It's two a.m.
The boss has gone
I'm sitting here waitin'
This desktop's slow
I am getting tired of fixin' all my coworkers' problems
Yeah there's a bug on the loose
Errors in the code
This is unreadable
Rubber ducky can't help
I cannot debug, my whole life spins into a frenzy

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow

I'm falling down a spiral
Solution unkown
Disgusting legacy, ugly code
Can't get no connection
Can't get through to commit

Well the night weights heavy
On my confused mind
Where's the error on this line
When the CEO comes
He knows damn well
To keep his distance
And he says

Help I'm slippin' into the programming zone
Git push to the prod
Set up a repo
My hard drive just crashed
All my code is gone
Where am I to go
Now that I've broke my distro
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
Soon you will come to know
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow
When you need Stack Overflow, a ha
When you need Stack Overflow

Once I strongly hissed at my boss from that time in a "stop now or I start yelling" voice.
We had an emergency and I was already working late to fix it. 8pm, only the both of us were still in the office. I was in the zone, still searching for the source of the problem and he kept coming in every 2-5 minutes offering his help, ripping every shred of concentration right off my skull, but he had absolutely no relevant technical skills, experience or information. There was nothing he could do.
In the end I hissed at him "Get your fucking ass out of here and let me do my job. This piece of shit kills my day and there is nothing you can do besides to say 'go home'."
Then he finally let me do my job.

when you really must go to the bathroom but don't want to leave your code as you are in the zone....

[ ] be humble, but not unconfident.
[ ] Step out of your comfort zone. Don't apply to a job that is exactly like your last one.
[ ] A good team is the most important thing for a developer. Intelligent, and nice people to work with and to learn from is more important than the salary difference between jobs.
Try to 'feel' for a good team. Ask to be introduced or to look around when you finish the interview.

Stepped out of my comfort zone and dropped a Zoom link into the channel for Lambda grads to see if anyone wanted to work through code challenges together. It ended up being enjoyable enough that I’m thinking of making it a regular thing. Meanwhile, contribution graph is still going strong.

*coding*

*notices coffee is cold, puts it on stove with flame burner on low, to warm up*

*sits back down, goes back to coding*

*hears fizzing popping sounds... coffee overflows and boils*

FUCK - every other day for the past month ,every single time... lol

Follow up to my (ignorant) previous rant.

Context: Eclipse vs intelliJ
Situation: Was too comfortable with eclipse. knew shortcuts in the back of my palm. Loved the light theme. Argued with anyone who blindly believed IntelliJ is better than eclipse.
Action: Forced myself to try IntelliJ. Stepped out of my comfort zone. Got a one day code block. Changed to darcula. My eyes struggled to read. My fingers typed usual eclipse shortcuts to discover unknown windows.
Verdict: after two days of learning and not giving up. I have started loving IntelliJ and I know why.
Moral: change is good. Get out of your comfort zone ;)

Rant!

When I'm in my "zone" working please for the love of god don't stand behind me staring at me and my screen, every time you do that you make me feel that my privacy is being raped and I can't do anything about it !!

I love to work in pubs/bars, this special kind of noisy environment works so well for me. I even go "into the zone".

Lets talk about this. Is anyone else the same? Just curious.

These are my 6 reasons:

0) Beer. 🍺
1) None of the activity in a bar actually interests to me, if you know what I mean. In my house, every single noise/movement will get my attention.
2) After some time all the noise blends into a kind of "homogeneous hearing blurb". Like a mantra. Maybe there are even white/pink/brown noise benefits (guess).
3) I go to places where I enjoy the music and atmosphere.
4) I like bars and pubs anyways. I feel good in these places.
5) Beer. 🍺

A misconception that software engineers just sit in front of their laptops and code 40 hours a week, with no social interaction.

A software engineer’s job is actually pretty social. Personally, I probably spend around half of my time interacting with people. This could be partially due to 1:1, team, and other meetings. But a large part of it is spent in bouncing off ideas about your project with your project mates (especially during the planning phase), chiming in the conversations about some recent or urgent problems to help find or propose solutions, answering others’ questions, organizing some events, etc.

Of course, I do need some dedicated uninterrupted time to focus on programming and to get into the zone, but it’s certainly not the only activity I do at work. The main point to understand is that the software engineering is not a solitary, but a social job.

Overall, I’m very happy with my profession. The enjoyment I get out of my work vastly outweighs all of these points combined.

I have to actually like what I'm working on to get in the zone, and a nice glass of water;

You can't forget the good 'ol " fuck off, I'm coding " sign though.

So I was using Coffee Meet Bagel to talk to a girl who is currently travelling. We noticed that the messages were sorted out of orders with incorrect time due to the different time zone we are in.

So naturally, I sent them a big report.

Their support team replied by telling me to do the usual. Restart, update, reinstall, delete everything etc (it’s their default answer!!).

I told them I have done those.

They then rephrased my bug report and told me this is expected as the chat was between two parties with a different time so the messages are sorted out of order due to the time difference.

I guess most developer will get ticked off by that... so I sent them a few pseudo code on how chat across different time zones should have been dealt with...

Life of a developer. Debugging and coding even when on a dating app... 🤷🏽‍♂️

Tunes throughout the work day...

Someone's interrupting:
Queen, Don't Stop Me Now

Working on same bug for hours:
Muse, Supermassive Black Hole

Merge Conflicts:
Jay Z, 99 problems

In the zone coding:
xzibit, Concentrate

All bugs squashed, deployed, going home:
Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World

!rant

One of our clients discovered a bug on our site about an hour ago. I wrote up a fix, and after very little testing, pushed it into production. I then immediately left to go home.

You can say I like to live my life dangerously.

That feeling when you finish work on Friday having built something really cool, but don't want to stop working on it.

Partly because you were enjoying it, partly because you were in the zone, and partly because you're scared that you are going to forget how it works by Monday!

-= Me in the zone hacking out code during meeting with customer for an emergency change =-

-ready to deploy just need to....-

Me to myself:

"Oh ... oh shit ... I forgot who the customer is / who this is for / what time it is ... how do I ask these people on the call who the fuck they even are....?"

(｀_´)ゞ

In the zone, and listening to music.
Manager taps me on the shoulder.
I turn off my music, and face him.
He say "hi", and then walks away.

... Why?

Just finished a 18 hour coding day (It‘s 5:30am here). I just realized that coding is one of the few things I really get in the zone (flow state). It‘s so awesome how I can forget everything around me and be 100% focused on what I‘m doing. And the best thing: I really feel relaxed now.

24th, Christmas: BIND slaves decide to suddenly stop accepting zone transfers from the master. Half a day of raging and I still couldn't figure out why. dig axfr works fine, but the slaves refuse a zone update according to tcpdump logs.

25th, 2nd day: A server decides to go down and take half my network with it. Turns out that a Python script managed to crash the goddamn kernel.

Thank you very much technology for making the Christmas days just a little bit better ❤️

At least I didn't have anything to do during either days, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to be fair, I did manage to make a Telegram bot with fancy webhooks and whatnot in 5MB of memory and 18MB of storage. Maybe I should just write the whole thing and make another sacred temple where shitty code gets beaten the fuck out of the system. Terry must've been onto something...

I just got the question why I'm moving around so much when I'm programming...
How can you NOT move around!? Let me dance, air guitar, air drum and I will perform three times better! It's my zone :-D

When I'm in the zone and a spam text interupts me... Fuck you!

I have an exam today. I'm not prepared. Also some cunt almost hit me with their car when I was on my way to uni and had the fucking audacity to yell at me over it. I wish many painful things on that whore who drove her car into a pedestrian zone with 50 km/h and blamed me for being there. I did not need to be spooked further before my exam. Just end me now please.

It’s like the twilight zone

Sitting on the toilet seat
.
.
.
Gets me in the zone

As we all know that yawning is contagious, so if we yawn standing in front of a mirror, does that mean we'll end up in an infinite loop 🤔🤔

How do you get in the zone?

Distraction behavior is my worst enemy. I'm productive once I'm coding, but I will do everything under the sun before I start.

Any tips or tricks you use to overrule your lizard brain?

I love beer. I like trying things out of my comfort zone. German and Belgian beers are absolutely delish, them mfkers know how to make a good brew. I also like my Japanese and Mexican beers, and even though europeans shit on them all the time, there are tons of American brands I love.

But......for the life of me.....every IPA I take tastes like fucking dishwater soap. From artisanal to regular market brands, everything in between. Fuck me man I can't stand the taste.

Anyone feels the same?

I became a programmer so that I could have the privilege of working remotely. So I am at home, my mom's place that is. I can never get in the "concentration zone" first thing in the morning, because before I know it, my mother and sister are having some stupid heated up argument about clothes and shit, and it bothers me anyway through my headphones -.-

Now I think I'd rather work in an office.

I fucking hate people that talk bad about things they know nothing about.

The best thing that I have learned is to always keep my mind open.

From "Linux sucks because there is no software" to "MacBooks are just for rich morons" to "All Microsoft tech is shit" to "CS degrees are just a bunch of useless math" to "Bing sucks".

Fuck, what do you know?? You never spent 5 minutes to try them or get informed about them. You have your shitty ideas and will keep having them because you don't care about the truth... You only care about your comfort zone.

Yes, Bing sucks. I tried it. Google shows me better results.
iPhone might suck. I don't know. Never had the opportunity to try one for long enough.

Whenever you're throwing shit at something, stop and ask yourself: do I know the whole story?

When you're in the optimizing code zone

Best/worst career choices.

Worst: working overtime and performing awesome feats of superhuman strength to the point of being burnt out and bitter. Turns out I'm just a human being. Cool.

Best: learning, implementing, pushing my comfort zone, and sharing/learning with others. Standing by my design decisions and seeing them blossom into elegant/robust solutions is so incredibly satisfying, and kinda scary. Believe in your abilities, yo.

Fixing bugs in programming is like scoring a touchdown when you really didn't even know you had the ball, or where the end zone is.

Hey DevRant Fam! Hope everyone is doing very well! Just would like to ask, for awhile now i have been focusing on languages such as c++, C#, Java, and little bit of python the others I mentioned before were mainly from Uni, but I’d like to step out of my comfort zone a little, I’m interested in learning things such as “NodeJS”.

I actually haven’t laid much of a finger on JS so i do not know much, and i also see things such as Nodejs, react are very popular and would like to step my foot in the door, what would you guys suggest and or recommend :-) I’m open to listen to you guys and learn more!.

Hope everyone is doing well wherever you may be!

Thank you 😊
Milo

Hmm getting in the zone huh?

Well a good poop
Mug of hot coffee
2 chocolate biscuits
Big glass of water on standby
Headphones , spotify and my metal mix

What's the point in having a relaxation/fun/chill zone/room in your company when you never have the time to use it except maybe on your lunch break? 🤔🤔

Two days ago I was so close to being single again. Reason? I was in the zone when my fiancée called, the ring of the phone jarred me so much that I contemplated smashing the phone at the wall. I didn't but just turned it off. I guess she must have called a couple more times because when we finally spoke she was so angry that she threatened to get her stuff from my place. Luckily I later got back in the zone, and luckier still, I have a girlfriend.

need to schedule a call with a guy from another branch at work. i tell him that because of the time zone shift, i can do earliest around noon his time (and that's being generous, thats really early for a dev my time)

and of course, what does he turn around and do? sends me a meeting for 3 AM...

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

i can't be the one with mental illness right?

perhaps the thing to do is just go around being so fucking ignorant you're just blissfully happy at all times

Dark-themed IDE + back-lit keyboard + coffee + headphones = best coding environment ^_^

Though there's always that one asshole who decides to talk to you Only when you're in the zone.

So I'm in Italy, close to Milan, the biggest infected zone in the whole country.

I'm still going to work as we're in 2 people in the office and we're alone in a 90 square meters office, so no big deal after all.

My city is actually empty right now, so I'm just going from home to work speeding on my motorcycle (no really that speeding, since my motorcycle isn't that powerful)

So nothing really changed actually and I'm still working the same way I did before

I just got an email that a client changed their DNS zone files to point at a new server. Turns out that they haven't set the server up yet. Client is wondering why that domain's emails aren't working, and why their site is down. They didn't want to give me the Domain's portal login credentials until now, because they "could do it without [me]." Tomorrow morning should be fun.

Sometimes I spend entire days working dark-to-dark with my headphones on

... without even listening to anything

And if I happen to be "in the zone", after the whole day of having my headphones on and not listening to anything, I take them off and feel like it's so quiet out of a sudden. It feels like I was in a noisy discussion (with myself) whilst I was "in the zone".

Just sharing my observations :)

This is the poster I have on my door, in the hopes it would determine people from disturbing me and consequently taking me out of the zone and productivity streak I'm on. Sadly it does not work as often as I'd like it to 🙁 but I still love it 😆

when im in the zone and somebody says something to me and I'm like:
"yes, sure!">/dev/null

I tend to load up Spotify put on my noise cancelling headphones and zone out and become one with the code.
Super deep.
Like deeper than neo.
Also have to have my hands on my mechanical keyboard at home.

Junior devs who are unable to use Google and don't respect your headphones, brutally pulling you out of the zone. There's a special place in hell for these guys.

Alright ladies and Gents, i find this topic very interesting but who cannot code without listening and who cannot code without silence

If your in the music listening category, what music genre hits that coding sorcery zone for you?

Now, I started in a new position as a dev back in September 2020 - after some starting pleasantries like "how are you", "whats up", "how is your weekend" the working relationship with my office partner soured.

It started with asking me TOTALLY random questions while my headset was on and i was "in the zone". These were questions like: "where should I buy a car", "Why is the virus spreading so fast". I tried to answer politely but made it very clear that when the headset is on my brain and every fibre in my body is inside the code and f---ing it.

Then it escalated, she called me 9.30PM on xmas day and wondered if i needed the API we are using........ Which i most certainly did not.

Now she hates me because I asked to move to another office and was granted that request 15 minutes after asking....

Any Stromae fans on devrant

His music get me in the zone...when code works and test pass 😅😅😅

I wanna be a millionaire, so fuckin bad.

So, throughout this week there have been massive trials and tribulations regarding my lack of coding practice however through many nights and days coding I have almost completed the task I was set last week.

I didn't realise how out of practice I was so this posed as a big challenge for me. However I pulled through and tomorrow it will be ready to send for the interview!

I also have another test to do in vanilla php - Typical blog which would be such a doddle now I'm back in the zone. I just have to remember I'm not using Laravel!

The sense of accomplishment is real and I'm so relieved I've come this far. Maybe I will have this career of my dreams which I rightfully deserve.

Below is Stripe, doing random tests :)

When i'm in the coding zone i listen the same song on loop, is that weird?

I am great at getting raspberry pi projects about 97% done...

But absolute shit at that last 3%.

Working on a home built WiFi repeater and deauther (front) and a 1TB SSD nextcloudpi server (back). Definitely outside my comfort zone, especially the first one. Despite having mad time on terminal, and SSH every day, I am very soft on this networking shit.

wpa_supplicant, though I do not now, I will come to understand your mysteries.

Seriously, a new guy joined out team and suddenly I'm out of my comfort zone and started following the pattern I used to follow. The thing he did, commented on my PR, a lot of comments.
I had this thing that hey now I can control anything right, new guy? less experienced? yes, so I don't need to be intimidated. But I realised today that I'm easily intimidated my intelligent people because I think now I am the inferior one.

I will push myself to think about it in a better way, by looking at it positively, to learn something from it.

What is your GOTO song to get in the zone to code? Mine is Pagan Revolution by Elvenking 🤘

Sometimes I hate it to be a "computer-guy". There is this one beautiful girl, I see her everyday in the train, but I just can't talk to her. I hate myself for not just saying " Hi" or whatever. I'd love to "just say something", but it doesn't work! Why the fuck am I thinking this much?!

Any tips? From dev to dev? Please?!

So,

A) I suck at digital drawing.
B) They have not invited me to the third interview like they said they would in the second interview.
C) I am still working on the PhD application. Still think the CV is bad, the SOP sucks, and back and forth emailing professors about recommendation letters. I am not built for this, but who is. So out of comfort zone. So unrelated to actual research or brain capabilities.
D) Moving in with parents is all fun and games and "I can do this", until you get stuck inside with them for over a month because of lockdowns.

... I hope next year is going to be better...

I'm living in the twilight zone...
These people upload and download an entire directory of files from microsoft teams as their way of version control...

And what's worse they're dragging their feet on changing over to git/github

God save me

I'm too ignorant about the rituals you need to do for dating.

I don't usually befriend ladies, I would just keep my distance. being a little cold to them, not hanging around, not chatting too much with them, just a greeting if possible

1. I try to get a little closer(just a little. to avoid da frend zone) to those I'm interested
2. I ask them to a date
3. If she refuses then back the 'being cold' attitude.
4. If she accepts... Haven't happened so I don't fucking know D:

I'm just inept at dealing with landing a date (not coding affecting my dating)

I've just come to my hometown for my brother's wedding. I didn't even deboard the plane and I had 10 messages from my manager to fix an issue.
Now here I am in the fucking smoking zone of the airport pushing code to gitlab at 12 in the night..!
FML

Today tragedy has struck, I forgot my ear phones

I couldn't get into the zone, had issues with bugs and had to listen to people breathe and make mouth noises in the train.

I had to resort to playing songs in my head which didn't draw out any distracting noises

It's been 1 year in my crappy yet comfy and high paying IT job(my first job).

I have already been in 2 dev interviews, with 3 more on the way.

The end of my IT career is near, the future is bright and full of code!

"can you please approve my PR?" yes, sure I'm happy to drop the context I built in my head, to pick up your totally different context, review your code and then rebuild my context.

I get an automated alert on slack whenever I'm requested a review on git, can't you fucking wait 20-40 mins when I'm out of the zone? Ffs.

I'm going to be that guy .... A lot of these rants are about code compiling first time .. Throwing away code you wrote because you didn't need it... Getting in the zone and writing a billion lines before you compile .... Am I the only freaking person here that does TDD ? My rant is wake up people ! People evangelize about it because it fucking works !

Corporations... huge, old, monolithic
We want you to automate but will do everything we can to prevent you from getting resources to do it. Restricting policies, decisions by managers on "what they do not want". No procedures on how to achieve the result within policies. Half the business lives in a gray zone and sea of policy exceptions.
We finally decided to get at least Azure subscription instead of trying to develop similar framework internally, but wE DoNT WANt YOu to dEPlOY thERE As WE Don't cOnSIDEr it sAfE ENough.
Like pissing against wind.

Great, I'm in the zone.
Typing like there's no tommorow.
The logic is flawless, design patterns and exception throwing everywhere
It's going to be gre.... DUN.

OH GOD A BSOD.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
Breath slowly... Just restart the machine...
PLEASE WAIT WHILE WINDOWS INSTALLS THE UPDATES

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

I really hate interruptions when i'm deep in my code. Headset on and blocking out the world, then get annoyed taps on the shoulder from boss for not greeting people.
So now i'm out of the zone, browsing devrant and have pissed off the boss for being anti-social.

*le me working hard, in the zone*

*a wild popup appear*

*logitech wants to update*

*I look*

*I'm annoyed, I want to continue with what I was doing*

errrhmm what was in doing again?

*Out of the zone*

Fucking update notifications

GMT/UTC
IST
ACST
CST
PST
.
.
.
.
.
Man Fuck time zones, I don't even know where I belong anymore while keeping track of all of them at once.
Fuck You In The Ass Time Zone

Two brainfarts that resulted in... a lot of pain

I had been coding all day, ~6hrs. I was in the zone, so I hadn't saved to git. It was all uncommitted changes (you see where this is going...)

Brainfart#1: The code used the "Contact" class, but for some reason my hands typed "Product" in this ONE line.

Brainfart#2: I became aware of Brainfart#1, so I changed the variable from "Product" to "Contact". However, I instinctively pressed F2, "Rename Symbol", instead of just changing the variable I was using. Now ALL of the references to "Product" were to the "Contact" class instead, across all of our code.

I finished coding. I committed and pushed the changes, closed the IDE, and left the desk for a snack. When I came back, the automated tests were failing due to an import error. That's when I noticed my mistake. I couldn't do Ctrl+Z because I had closed the editor. I had to change the names one by one across all of our code. "Contact" and "Product" are probably our two most used classes 😭

Headphones on, in the zone, deep into some heavyweight logic, blissfully unaware of the office surroundings.

Get tapped on shoulder. "hey, I've finished that easy task a deformed amoeba could have done. Want to see?"

NO!

I am very drunk and in the zone right now for innovation.

And I just wanna ask if what can y'all imply for blockchain being integrated in agritech.

And yes I can still type like a sober mofo. Cheers

Fucking corporate bullshit, I was coding (mostly creating bugs and pulling my hair off) all night on my free time (I'm on night shifts I keep the schedule when I have my days off) and at the moment I was making huge progress on my project, I gotta go to sleep to go back to work 4h later to follow a fucking 2h training on team efficiency and cohesion, in other words, how to waste 2h in a useless meeting and not getting it back + interrupting the only night I was in the zone, I'm so tired of this....

Just drove home after working late at the office. Was kind of in the zone and didn't wanna stop.
On my way I see the police closing the road in front of me, because of a pretty bad accident that happened a couple minutes ago.
MFW Coding saved my life!

When you are in the zone coding and you get a call at work "asking if your busy?" :/ then being told it's not important it can wait.... So you hang up and cannot remember wtf you were in the middle of.

When you make a coffee, get in the zone, forget about its existence, take a drink it and find that it's gone cold.. Then chug it and go make yourself another.

IDK, man.. It feels like we're stuck.

Looking back at 19xx we got the Moon landing, basically, all the computer protocols that are the essence of what we have today, all the inventions' ideas patented (started even earlier -- 18xx), ...

To me, it feels like scientific progress was at its peak in the past 200 years and has now slowed down considerably.

IDK, perhaps I'm living under a rock, but all I can see is building consumerism on top of what's been discovered/created in the past 200 years and not actually creating/doing anything new and original and actually useful.

Don't you feel like we're stuck in the age where we're enjoying the fruits of discoveries made by our grandparents and are too lazy to make new ones?

If so, then what's next? When are we going to (if ever) get bored by the comfort zone we are in now? What follows then? Progress or regress? Or the MadMax IRL?

What do you lads think?

When your in the zone and somebody interrupts you...

i'm so in the zone that i was expecting an algorithm when i saw "canon in C" today.

Earphones on.

Notifications off.

A boss who is the most inefficient boss ever. No, yours is not, mine is, trust me.

In the middle of coding, never in the zone for obvious reasons. A workmate wants me to call him to discuss stuff as he is working from home, which I wish I were.
I keep coding and decide to call him later.

My boss interrupts me again to TELL ME IF I CAN CALL MY WORKMATE.
Whyyyyyy
FML.

Funny thing the brain is.

TL;DR; being in the zone is nice. But there is another level of it and, fuck it, I'm loving it!!!

level 0: phased-out, relaxed state. Not focused on anything in particular. Just going with the flow

level 1: aware of the situation and of what's going on, not engaging too much

level 2: alert, ready to react. Constant concentration

level 3: THE ZONE. Time continuum is broken by concentration on the task in front of you - while working on it, time passes faster by magnitudes than when you're in any lower level. Surroundings and periphery do not exist. On;y the task currently in hand exists. Restroom breaks can wait.

level 4: body works on the task by itself. Any cognitive engagement with any of it will only make matters worse. The body knows it better, just let it do the work - let your consciousness sit back and relax, think about something nice. It's a sort of biological version of DMA (direct memory access), bypassing the CPU.

I've only reached level 4 several times, briefly and only while playing BeatSaber. The boxes are flying at me and hands just hit 'em the right way by themselves. Only after the hit, do I realise what my hands did and how cool it actually is. If I try to intentionally look at the boxed and aim for them, I mess it all up. And it's not like muscle memory - level 4 copes with any non-Camellia Expert level, regardless of whether have I played it in the past many times or just a few, several months ago.

I love that feeling!

At night is when my creativity starts flowing like a motherfucker. The moment when all the tasks are done for the day and you can start working on your own projects and just lay back and smoke (or drink, whichever you prefer) and zone the fuck out with some good music. Oh and if I've gotten a good work out in that day, then there's no stopping me.

I had no plans to even create an admin panel for my own small project but last night I made one just to make it look professional. After that, I got an idea for a separate project which I started working on. I usually write my ideas down so that I don't get into a complete project cluster fuck with 50 half completed projects, but sometimes you get that golden one that you have to start (currently those are the only two unfinished projects I got).

To get into the zone I need 5 minutes to focus, think and lay out a plan. Need a clear schedule the next 4 hours, minimum. Clean desk, headset on, water refilled and a fresh coffee. Away we go.

10 minutes later someone taps me on my shoulder .. fuck!! Every damn time

Argh, time to drop out of the zone to go stuff calories in my face again. Just hook me up to an IV already and let me make cool shit!

Ps @dfox it'd be cool if we could take a picture to post straight from app.

In the zone coding... oh what's this? A text from the wife? Apparently now's the time to resolve last night's fight.

"You're a programmer, dammit!" Damian Conway

I'm at a seminar given by Conway right now, so much stuff I wish I had heard before about how to be more productive and how to stay "in the zone" while programming without distractions. If any of you ever gets a chance of following one of his seminars (he also wrote books), it's highly recommended.

Setupwars. Show off your epic coding zone setup.

Your biggest oh fuck moment as developer. "I dropped the prod DB"

If I close my eyes will all the problems pleas go away?

😭

These days where you haven't slept, woke up to smartphone having seizures and work began by spawning into a combat zone.

No I wasn't ready to fight, me wants sleep.

😫

The feeling when you're in the zone for some important tasks and your coworkers just come and seat besides your table, start bullshitting each other with their flights delay stories. I wish there is a dismiss button for this kind of occasions.

I made a huge mistake

I got "in the zone", I was coding so nice and fast and everything was working, so I didn't want to commit every single minute and then have to go back, cherrypick commits squash them revert them etc.

So I didn't commit anything at all... Now if I were to commit the commit would modify 2 files, create 26 new files and delete 2 files.

The changes include moving from JS to TS, implementing a desearialization scheme, implementing a server class and wrapper client classes, with common type interfaces for different requests...

So now I need to save my changes somewhere, go back to the last commit and slowly incorporate the changes.

I'm dumb

Do your companies have dedicated software / web architects / designers, or are most places just a group of developers who are also expected to do design and architecture work?

Do you have dedicated front end teams and back end teams, or are most places just a mix of people who do everything?

I'm asking this because im a junior dev being given a large project, mostly to head up on my own (!), where I have to do design and architecture work which I feel is completely out of my comfort zone, and I want to know if this kind of thing happens often? Are developers supposed to design specs, pick the tech to use.. etc.?

Relationship between ranting and productivity.

When productivity increases, ranting increases as you are dealing with a lot of shit. So ranting is actually beneficial to high productivity.

When productivity decreases below zero because you have a lot of fucking problems, your ranting also increases sharply.

The only peace zone is with moderate, positive or negative, productivity and low ranting, i.e when you are not doing much

Anyone have success dealing with nondevs and explaining the “zone” and to not interrupt if I’m programming and would like to share their techniques? I’m the only developer in the company I work for and all my coworkers/bosses don’t get it and even give me grief about using headphones in the office. I’ve actually gone into vacant offices off the open floor plan to try and program uninterrupted, but I don’t know how long I can keep that up without catching flak.

At home: a glass of nice single malt whiskey, headphones on with some chill background music and that's all I need.

At work: First half an hour up to one hours goes into deciding what to do / waking up and having the first 2-4 cups of coffee.

Headphones on with some chill background music and I get into the zone for a quick moment before it's lunch time and it takes up to 1h after the lunch break to get back to the zone and multiple coffee cups.

In the afternoon I usually get into the zone and real speed with my work and quite often almost forget to go home :/

When you're in the zone, writing your genius down before you forget it, and you smartwatch reminds you to go stand and move around. 😑

When you're clearly in the zone:

Excluding merges, 1 author has pushed 22 commits to master and 22 commits to all branches. On master, 70 files have changed and there have been 16,339 additions and 321 deletions.

Oh man setting up postfix and dovecot (plus things like rspamd) is a pain in the ass.
But it's worth it, having your own mail server is just quite a good feeling.
Now I just need to find out how to get it to pass the spam filter of Google, despite the server and the DNS zone being well-configured (better than my school's mail server according to tests, but that one still manages to pass. I have no idea why.)

An actual text from my CS Human-Machine Interfaces book:

"How do users react when a vending machine "eats" their money and doesn't give the product? Most likely, they will kick the machine in hopes of it returning him the money. Therefore, if we build a machine which has a "Cancel" button which returns the money in the lower part of the machine (the "kick zone") we would be improving the usability of the system a lot'

1st reaction: Wait, what the fuck?
2nd reaction: It ain't stupid if it works, I can't argue with that 🤔

Just give me anything BUT coding to work on and I'm instantly in the zone for coding. End of Year Review, access reviews for Audit, any other kind of paperwork, which is most of what my job is these days, and I have some brilliant insight into a problem on my back burner, or a brilliantly simple way to implement a feature I've been stewing on for weeks.

It's my procrastinating nature to not want to do the thing I HAVE to do.

Maybe I should volunteer for more paperwork?

I remember I couldn't compile a clean Xamarin Forms project on Visual Studio because of a System.TimeZoneInfoNotFoundException. The workaround?, changed my time zone to Central time USA-Canada. So apparently it is not allowed to use Xamarin in the third world...

when you're in the zone coding away and the coo comes into your office to kick you out because he wants to go home and he has to set the building's alarm before leaving

Have you ever thought "I'll listen to X playlist/album/song, but first I'll figure out this Y project related thing", but ended up working without any music for way longer than expected without even realizing it?