
Ask HN: What do you do while your project builds? - jozzz
I&#x27;m currently working on a program that takes around 30 seconds to build, when making changes to a single file.
So far I have been switching to Chrome and checking HN&#x2F;News&#x2F;Facebook whilst it builds.
Inevitably I don&#x27;t switch back immediately when it finishes building, and the distraction to something completely different no doubt decreases productivity.
I suppose I should just stare at the build screen and think about what I&#x27;m going to do when the build finishes.
What does HN do in these situations? What if the build time is into the minutes?<p>inb4 relevant xkcd 303.
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mdeimel
Perhaps a few ideas, hopefully something is helpful.

1\. It would be nice if you could setup an alert when your project is done
building (audio or visual) so you can get back to it right away.

2\. When I used to work on a similar scale project, I put in a lot of effort
to improve build time (initially on Windows I worked on keeping the computer
defragged, and other tricks to improve build time, eventually switching to
Linux).

3\. It's nice to use the time doing something that is relevant to the job,
like reading more and understanding the technology stack better. Reading
through tutorials on new subjects, etc.

While 30 minutes is certainly a long time, hopefully the time can be used
productively, it will certainly help you more in the long run!

Good luck!

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jozzz
> 30 seconds

Certainly if something took 30 minutes to build I would be taking drastic to
reduce this time!

What I should probably be doing is setting the build off in "screen" then just
continuing to look at code whilst it builds.

