
The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-Lapse - rickdale
http://blog.nickwinter.net/the-120-hour-workweek-epic-coding-time-lapse
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code_scrapping
It seems like an interesting experiment, but I disagree with the conclusions
of "I was getting better, I was happy". This is not sustainable and by all
psychological/physical measurements this should be very bad for the person.

Can we kill the Cult of the Workaholic already?

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lennel
I agree. I hope once the haze has settled he has to maintain this code.

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serickson
He will. And I will. I've worked with him for years and while our code is not
the best code, we do strive to make it maintainable. Especially for a large
project like this that we'd like to build a community of coders around.

~~~
code_scrapping
Don't take this the wrong way - nobody means any disrespect your work, but I'm
skeptical (to say the least) about this being a sustainable tempo of work.

So, if you are pulling it off, can you give a comment on how long have you
been working like this, and whether there's an simple trade-off in terms of
restfulness, social life, etc... You know, can you live like this, and for how
long.

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GrinningFool
Discussions around the merits of a 120 hour work week aside, this video was a
pretty cool thing.

Though I do notice that the author spends most of his time looking up and
left. As someone with neck troubles, I suggest rearranging the layout so that
most time is spent looking straight ahead, with head mostly level - before you
develop the same kinds of troubles.

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nwinter
Thanks for the tip. I actually just got a second monitor (third screen) but
wasn't able to time-lapse it, so for this week I was unbalanced mostly looking
at just one of the screens. I shall now rearrange my gaze targets.

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kiskis
I think this is cool and in my opinion has nothing to do with the workaholic
culture.

I never did a deliberate 120 week, but I can attest that when I constantly do
>12 hour days for a limited(!!) period my focus was much better. While there
may be a cognitive decline because of the hours I believe there is a positive
counterbalance when you do not need to worry about food, emails, laundry or
any mundane tasks and basically you never unload the problem from your head.
For certain type of coding tasks that gives much more than what is removed
because of the tiredness.

This is something like an ironman. You can do it a few times, it puts you into
a zen state, but obviously you don't run an ironman every day or every week of
your life.

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awjr
"Normally, I work a focused-but-relaxed 60 hours in a week." Ouch, not sure I
could cope with that.

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lincolnq
Yes, most people aren't Nick Winter, and shouldn't be doing 60 hours a week.
He is a self-improvement machine. His ebook "The Motivation Hacker", which I
highly recommend, explains how he does it. [http://www.nickwinter.net/the-
motivation-hacker](http://www.nickwinter.net/the-motivation-hacker)

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jahaja
With all due respect; the description of that book sounds almost pathological
to me. But hey, most people aren't Nick Winter.

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rickdale
Might sound that way, but its a good book. Short and cheap, well worth the
read.

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eloff
This makes me nostalgic for my single days. When I could code without
interruption for long periods of time. But I'm happier now and have a better
work/life balance. I'd swear that makes me more productive.

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JayEnn
Oh dear. This is going to be used as a stick to beat developers who work their
contracted hours.

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borplk
I work 40 hours a week and I already think that's too much.

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disdev
Obviously that's not sustainable... but even the 60 hour version sounds pretty
rough to me. Without a wife and kids, maybe. But I think if I tried this I
wouldn't have to worry about a wife and kids anymore.

Am I the only one who works better and more efficiently when I have a little
bit of a break in between?

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rimo
> viking metal is stronger than sleep

Yes.

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brianwawok
This would be really fun to do for a project I was really into. My only
changes would be:

a) A week off afterwards without touching a computer to get sane again

b) An hour a day for exercise, because I would not be willing to let my health
go that bad. Sitting 120 hours isn't good, but at least a little exercise
would raise my sanity/health a little

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nwinter
I used an adjustable-height standing/sitting desk, so I was standing maybe 40%
of the time. I agree, I can't imagine doing it seated the whole time.

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yamaneko
I think the main conclusion of this experiment is not to be workaholic, but
rather coding for fun and forgetting about deadlines.

When I am coding and my mind do a context change to think about my unpaid
bills or an approaching deadline, it severely decreases my focus.

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dudus
I would be interested to know how you recorded this. Including the stats.

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nwinter
Here's the code: [https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-
logger](https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger)

I initially wrote it as an self-tracking activity logger with no interface,
but when I went to do the time-lapse video, I added the HUD UI and made it
save screenshots at regular intervals. The HUD is actually showing on my
screen at all times, so it gets included in the screenshots. From those
screenshots, I just used ffmpeg to compile a video.

I haven't written this for anyone else to run it, but if you're running
Mavericks, you could try! You'd probably want to cut out some of the stuff,
like the part that shows the work graphs from my website.

The stats get recorded by all of the TPTracker*.m code. For keystrokes and
mouse movements, you just ask to get notified of all system events (the user
has to enable assistive access for Telepath). For window switches, light
levels, and webcam, you have to poll. GitHub, Trello, and Gmail are polling
web APIs, reading the API keys from stupid config files in Dropbox. For
tracking how many builds I've done, I wrote a hacky brunch plugin:
[https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-
brunch](https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-brunch) .

Current music comes from iTunes/Spotify distributed notifications, simple.
Work hours and happiness/energy/health come from distributed notifications
sent out by a Python script that parses my Emacs org mode files where I record
these things whenever I save those files with Emacs after-save-hooks. So those
would be unusable unless you were to modify the code to get some other way of
doing happiness and mood. Same with the rightmost section: a web view showing
the percentile feedback work graph from my website is not easily
transferrable.

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cfj
Total window switches: 32768

How very neat and appropriate for a programmer.

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lennel
sounds like the upper bound of a data type to me.

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xentronium
Would be one less.

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theorique
No, it is 1-indexed :)

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colinbartlett
What a horrible idea.

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applecore
Why?

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captn3m0
Does anyone know what the graph is at the bottom right?

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cliffcrosland
This is the graph: [http://www.nickwinter.net/codecombat-
stats](http://www.nickwinter.net/codecombat-stats). It is a percentile
feedback work graph, indicating what fraction of the day so far you have been
working on something productive, if I'm not mistaken.

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Qantourisc
Be careful, this is a great way to get a burnout !

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chris_wot
I'm sure the bug count was ridiculously high.

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serickson
Yes, but because so much was getting shifted around and refactored and added.
I don't think any more bugs were introduced than if he'd done the work over a
two or three week period. He spent a good portion of that week refactoring a
particularly old and central piece of code, and he spent the better part of
the weekend fixing bugs both old and new. So overall I believe we're ahead.

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vijayr
Those desks from ergo depot he mentions in the article, look awesome, but
quite pricey. Anyone know where to get a cheap one?

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alexrson
It's actually cheaper to have two desks, two monitors, two keyboards and mice.
Especially if you already extra gear lying around. I have this setup at work
and find it faster/easier than an adjustable desk.

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camperman
I'm glad I'm not the only one who still switches across to Quake and Nethack
to clear the mind for a few minutes.

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cliffcrosland
Those are screensavers, actually. Looks like he did almost nothing but code
last week during his waking hours.

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gsaines
Yeah, I helped him choose those screensavers, he basically wanted some video
to show while he was sleeping, that way the timelapse could be continuous. I
was especially pleased with the bus driver bit.

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michaelmior
While watching this, I started wondering how much of the code base you could
OCR from the video.

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alexrson
Interesting question. I guess it all depends on how much he jumps around
between files and different parts of files.

There's a scene in Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson which is similar to this
problem. The protagonist is in jail with a laptop which has the location of
treasure on it encrypted by a WWII Enigma machine. However, the bad guys can
see his screen at all times, so he needs to write the code to crack the cipher
without looking at the data. I won't spoil how he does it because I recommend
reading the book.

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michaelmior
Thanks for the book recommendation :)

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anantmendiratta
now this was an epic post. couldn't imagine this. i am not sure that somebody
can cope this that.

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nviennot
haha this is awesome :)

