
Ask HN: What do you do while you're waiting for code to compile? - karmacondon
I often find myself working on something that takes awhile to run. I make a change and then have to wait up to three minutes before I can see the result. It&#x27;s enough time that I feel silly just staring at the screen, but not long enough to accomplish anything else. So I usually check hn or my email and end up losing 15 or 20 minutes.<p>There have to be a lot of other people with this problem. What do you do while you&#x27;re waiting a short time for something to run or compile?
======
PaulHoule
(1) Your build cannot possibly be fast enough. Your boss will almost always
think it is a waste of time to spend time speeding up your build, but if you
work out the math in terms of minutes spent and minutes saved, the payoff time
can be as little as a week for spending 2 days improving your build.

(2) Your build cannot be fast enough. Quite likely you have a machine that was
chosen to be crazy cheap (Dell) or crazy beautiful (Mac) but not chosen to be
crazy fast. A crazy fast machine with an SSD and the best CPU you can get will
improve your productivity enough to pay for itself in 2 months or so if you do
the math. Your boss won't believe it, so you might just get one for yourself.

(3) It never hurts to get up and move around

(4) It is not a bad idea to stare at the screen and think. In fact, carefully
reading the output of your build should piss you off enough that you do
something at (1)

(5) Overall it is dangerous to juggle a large number of balls in the area, but
one exception to this is to carve out a single task you can work on while
waiting for builds and make switching to and from that task as easy as
possible. This task can be anything that makes progress towards your goals,
such as sorting the backlog, reading technical documentation, etc.

(6) Set up some kind of chime to ring when your build is done, that will help
you get back to it. It's one of those things that people don't seem to do, but
it works.

~~~
Jemaclus
Seconded. Your build cannot be fast enough!

------
theGREENsuit
Get up and walk around. Look out the window. Give your eyes a break from
staring at your screen.

------
gt565k
Work on UI stuff for other tasks that don't require the back-end.

Sometimes I'd read up on technical articles / blog posts related to what I'm
working on.

------
jasonkester
What language are you working in that takes this long to compile? I'm used to
C# compile times of a few seconds for thousand-class, 20 project solutions on
a nothing-special laptop.

Is it just a _really_ big project, or do there exist languages that compile
much slower than others?

------
yolesaber
Hang out and enjoy life.

------
bbcbasic
I am waiting for a compilation now. Here I am.

------
imauld
What's compiling? - Python Dev

------
mediocre_dev
Yoga or push-ups !

