

Time-lapse video of Bethany's maniac week of coding - bsoule
http://blog.beeminder.com/maniac

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jacquesm
I'm so terribly jealous of people able to read small fonts. Now that I can
finally afford large screen monitors my eyes are so messed up that I need to
set the font to 'huge' in order to be able to read (and that's _with_ glasses,
2.5).

What a super way to promote beeminder.com, and a very nice idea for a project.

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bsoule
Thank you!! My eyes are not great -- it was a 30" monitor.

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benjaminwootton
What tools are you using there? Is that mainly TMUX?

I also have a 30" monitor but haven't tried one huuuuge window for my dev
workflow. How does that work for you?

(On my phone so might be easier to see on a bigger screen)

~~~
bsoule
I'm terribly old-fashioned and use vim for development. My monolithic window
is iTerm2 which allows for split panes. It is pretty nice with my laptop
screen below for reference material.

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dreeves
Ok, this is too epic to keep putting off! I'm hereby precommitting to a maniac
weekend starting tomorrow! I'll reply here with a link to the time-lapse on
Monday...

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aaronpk
What exactly is your definition of "weekend" here? If you're counting hours we
have to know which hours to hold you accountable for!

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dreeves
Let's say 5pm Friday to 9am Monday?

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aaronpk
A potential of a 64-hour work-weekend? deal!

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dreeves
A more reasonable definition might be "5pm Friday till whenever you go to
sleep Sunday night" but this is not about being reasonable (quite the
opposite). I have no particular attachment to my sleep schedule so I'm hoping
I'll be on a roll Sunday night and push straight through to 9am Monday and
then collapse.

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bsoule
This was a ton of fun and I'd love to do it, or a modified shorter version of
it again. It's hard to shut down the rest of my life for an entire week, but
maybe a long weekend. Or I could do a week where the computer is taking
screenshots 9-5 and I pre-commit to post the video as soon as it is over.

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Permit
I think I would like to try this. Seeing it done twice has really got me
interested in this. I think the key is that you're held accountable for how
you spend your time due to the screenshots.

Reminds me of how a guy hired someone to slap him when he got off topic while
working:[http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-
craigsli...](http://hackthesystem.com/blog/why-i-hired-a-girl-on-craigslist-
to-slap-me-in-the-face-and-why-it-quadrupled-my-productivity/)

I don't have a Mac, so I guess I'll have to build the screenshot/webcam stuff
myself this weekend.

~~~
dreeves
Or, of course, Beeminder itself! (But, yes, we love the "craigslist slapper
guy", as many people seem to know him. That's in fact Maneesh Sethi, who's
launching a Beeminder competitor, [http://pavlok.com](http://pavlok.com) )

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kmtrowbr
Congrats Bethany! I am a long time Beeminder user. You guys work hard. I think
your tool is amazing, although, I have my ups and downs with it. :) Very proud
of you! Keep it up! I owe you a long email with thoughtful feedback.

~~~
dreeves
Thanks so much for saying so, Kevin! And we'll be hugely grateful for
feedback, especially insights on the downs you mention (be really blunt! it's
good for us!). And of course you should either beemind that long email or send
things piecemeal as you think of them...

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rdvrk
Cool! I need to try this someday (week). And the video is just pure madness.
You might want to add a small warning, though - I'm not an expert nor an
epileptic, but the video does look seizure inducing to me.

Plug: Maybe you could try a tiny chrome plugin I wrote:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-you-have-
anyt...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-you-have-anything-
be/hkaenpmlhpjkgfnfnbfjmkmjpjpmehpa)

It's a simple site blocker I made after doing the same /etc/hosts routine a
couple of times.

~~~
dreeves
Eep, anyone know whether a seizure trigger warning might be prudent? It
doesn't seem _that_ frenetic to me, but I'm not an expert either. Now I'm
really curious if youtube could algorithmically detect that.

PS: Thanks for the pointer to the chrome plugin! You can also do that very
well with RescueTime's FocusTime feature, which they happened to just blog
about today: [http://blog.rescuetime.com/2014/06/19/getting-the-most-
out-o...](http://blog.rescuetime.com/2014/06/19/getting-the-most-out-of-
rescuetimes-website-blocking/)

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bredren
This is pretty fun. Did you have any concern about privacy of her sessions?
Thanks for the post and conclusions.

~~~
bsoule
I ended up spending an embarrassing amount of time on the post processing
because I didn't spend enough time on setup ahead of time :)

I used [https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-
logger](https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger) to take screenshots. I
meant to have it take a screenshot of my top monitor only, and do anything
sensitive on my laptop screen, but I didn't configure it correctly, and wound
up with screenshots of my active window only, so I had to do some censoring,
e.g. when I needed to edit our keys file, or when I blurred out the screenshot
when I had to do some customer support.

~~~
bredren
That's a lot of post production work. :) I'd be embarrassed someone might see
I clicked through a TMZ link or something.

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nwinter
You probably wouldn't want to even click the TMZ link in the first place when
you knew you were making the video, since the post-production is so onerous.
It's like a precommitment that you're not going to get distracted. In fact,
when I did my maniac week, I precommitted to not doing any post-processing,
and it helped me focus a lot. I would think, "hmm, I wonder what the strongest
dog is!" but then realize I couldn't slack off on video, so I wouldn't even
Google it like normal.

~~~
icambron
I've thought about doing this as a general productivity tactic to force myself
to do less shit I don't want to be doing.

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sssilver
Please put spaces after commas in your code :'(

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bsoule
I'm pretty sure that's Strunk and White approved,yo.

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ejain
This needs more data layers! Heart rate, movement, blood sugar, EEG etc :-)

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aaronpk
I have some hardware I would happily donate to the next maniac week!

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joeevans
Is that the awesome tiling window manager?

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bsoule
It's iTerm2:
[http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home](http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home)

~~~
dreeves
If you're curious about other stuff we use at Beeminder:
[http://blog.beeminder.com/weusethat](http://blog.beeminder.com/weusethat)

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eendividi
related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685)

~~~
dreeves
Yes, this was all inspired by Nick Winter's epic 120-hour workweek, which he
posted a time-lapse video of. Here's a direct link to his video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14)

And while I'm at it, direct link to Bethany's:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODhx-
CbX9lg#t=40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODhx-CbX9lg#t=40)

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lnkmails
Can we look at the 67 commits and review them? </troll>

~~~
dreeves
Eventually! We're working (very gradually --
[http://beeminder.com/d/boss](http://beeminder.com/d/boss)) on open-sourcing
Beeminder. In fact, doing so is also inspired by Nick Winter and CodeCombat:
[http://blog.codecombat.com/we-have-open-sourced-
everything](http://blog.codecombat.com/we-have-open-sourced-everything)

