Probably isn't healthy, but I program all day at work. Go home and spend a few hours with family, then program an additional few hours every night. Sometimes I fall into the rabbit hole and emerge at 2-3 am after finally finishing what I started. Go to bed, and rinse and repeat the next day.
My brain just won't shut off at this point, but I enjoy absolutely everything about what I do.
Same here, terrible sleep when all you're doing is attempting debugging or refactoring without a keyboard. I am sure my short-term memory of non-programming related activities is severely affected because no matter where I am, I am coding, redesigning or imagining shit that is causing that hard to find memory corruption.
Movies are my unwinding method. And daily 1 hour walks.
> I am sure my short-term memory of non-programming related activities is severely affected because no matter where I am, I am coding, redesigning or imagining shit that is causing that hard to find memory corruption.
same here. I have the worst short-term memory for non-programming things ever.
> My brain just won't shut off at this point, but I enjoy absolutely everything about what I do.
Everybody is different so I’m not saying this will happen to you, but I recognize this mode from personal experience and what happened to me was something went sour. Management took a different direction and the thing I poured my heart in got critiqued and risked being shot down. At that point, I missed all the distance to be able to nuance it or say: it’s just work. Since it consumed much free time, dreams, etc. I found myself in a breakdown, and couldn’t touch code anymore. This luckily only lasted three weeks, but/and it made me change many of my ways to avoid something like that happen again and take three years. Which I’ve heard is not uncommon. Again, YMMV, but thought to share that even tough you have the best of times, mixing up work with non-work/dev can provide the necessary barrier/distance/perspective to deal with setbacks more gracefully.
I should have included the caveat that the coding/programming I do at home is on little side projects and experiments that aren't related to my every-day work.
I have these dreams as well and several times have actually "solved" a problem in my sleep, woken up in the middle of the night, coded it and it worked.
Sometimes I feel like coding triggers some area of the brain that is slightly autistic or aspergers-like, and I perseverate on it. If I reach a breakthrough I feel better.
I learned to say this to myself - "if I am stuck in a loop, then remember I might need to break out of the loop" - but I mean that not in the programming sense entirely, more behavioral.
Noticing that my brain can actually "think inside the algorithm", even in my sleep, has numerous times caused me to wonder if our brains are capable of essentially "running code" and that maybe neural networks and the like may really be onto something. But that's a different tangent.
Probably isn't healthy, but I program all day at work. Go home and spend a few hours with family, then program an additional few hours every night. Sometimes I fall into the rabbit hole and emerge at 2-3 am after finally finishing what I started. Go to bed, and rinse and repeat the next day.
My brain just won't shut off at this point, but I enjoy absolutely everything about what I do.