Code Monkey

Yet another day goes by with me coding during the sunset and then watching the sunrise still wide awake and cranking out code. You may wonder just what kind of a lifestyle that involves. Picture is worth a thousand words:

That is code monkey rocket fuel, baby.

I’m doing about 4 hours of sleep a day, give or take. This involves going to work at about 8-10 AM, working through approximately 1-2 PM. Meetings, phone calls, conference calls, staff meetings, quotes, feedback management, strategery. 🙂

At about 1-2 PM, after the lunch almost puts me into a coma (you’ll see why in the next paragraph) I head on home and sleep through 7-9 PM. Seeing how my wife  makes it home between 6-8 PM I don’t miss out on much. We hang out, watch TV, play on the computer, etc till about 11:30 That is when the code-monkey session comes on:

11 – 2 AM: Layout. While I am 100% sober and alert and can actually think I lay out the objectives, functions, layout, etc. Basically everything that requires a brain gets done here. 2 AM – 6 AM: Code grunt. This is your average coding session, filling in the blanks and making stuff actually functional. Then I wrap it up, upload it, and let my guys test, fix, optimize, etc. I love it, coding – without all that annoying frustrating stuff.

This of course means that any simple carb that enters my body takes approximately 20 minutes to put me in a slight coma. It comes at an advantage too. The other day I was driving back home at 110 Mph on I4 and didn’t even notice – it didn’t even occur to me to look at the speedometer – I just wondered why everyone was moving so slow. Hey, something is gonna kill you, at least this way it’s not prolonged.

It’s pretty exciting. What I’m working on now likely won’t see the light of day for a few months but as you’ve seen from Amazon last week and Microsoft PDC this week, the world of computing is getting it’s biggest paradigm shift in the lifetime of many of us that have only been a part of the “Internet” got pushed into mainstream. Being able to participate in the evolution of communication as big as the printing press or stone tablets is simply amazing – the world without people bolted to the table, tied to the wall and a computer that is constantly crashing or the server that requires a major surgery to keep going and an equivalent of sex change operation to upgrade to the new release…. this next generation of IT people can’t wait to put a tombstone on that kind of an experience and make electronic communication as effortless and taken for granted in reliability as the power, sewer and water systems we enjoy today.