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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

>Even more than that I care about the speed of the compiler. I am not a zen master of focus, and waiting 10+ seconds is wasteful, yes, but more importantly it breaks my flow. I flick over to Twitter and suddenly 5+ minutes are gone.

Quick suggestion, has really helped me: take that 10 or 20 seconds waiting for compilation, and stare out a window. This gives your eyes much needed break from focusing on a computer monitor, allows the muscles to refocus and breathe, and doing this regularly during a coding session can have important long-term benefits for your vision.

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>Quick suggestion, has really helped me: take that 10 or 20 seconds waiting for compilation, and stare out a window.

Wow, that sounds pretty nice. I wish I had a window to look out of.

Or you know, just look away from the monitor, in the physical space of your office/whatever instead of a flat surface, which would have similar benefits.

So many office spaces are rectilinear and planar. I find the fractal real world to be so much more restful to look at. It refreshes my mind in a way unlike any manufactured surface.

What the parent advised was not about what one finds "restful" or "refreshing the mind". It's about needed eye gymnastics -- re-focusing at different depths, etc.

That doesn't help much when you're in a room where the farthest wall is maybe 15 feet away.

10 or 20 seconds waiting for compilation .. but more importantly it breaks my flow

Luckliy the OP doesn't build for microprocessors etc. There you wait for compilation (of C, for instance) but than the damn thing has yet to be flashed.. Thing is, it actually learns you how to not let it break your flow. Which is a valuable skill.

My day job regularly involves git bisecting the Linux kernel and testing it on a hardware platform that can take up to 10 minutes to reboot. If I find a new bug introduced in an -rc1, that can be the better part of my afternoon gone just in bisection...

Agreed. Now that I'm not doing things where I have to build and then flash memory, my workflow seems to fast!

There are also browser extensions available to help with this, such as by forcing you to wait 30 seconds before a page on a given time-wasting site loads. Helps to break the instant gratification mechanisms that lead to destructive distraction.

A "focus" application (there are many for macs/pcs) that block certain websites, applications is also helpful. You can set it for an hour at a time, or whatever. It breaks that knee-jerk habit of wasting minutes on twitter/news/etc.

Still better to not look at a computer at all frequently, and focus on something in the distance.

Just make sure that nothing interesting is happening outside otherwise you will loose focus watching that :).

And if I remember correctly then focusing close for a long time doesn't affect your vision but can cause headache.

This is wrong. Your eye muscles can tire over the long term if not given a chance to focus on other distances. It's like standing up all day without ever sitting down. The eyes are fundamentally muscles.

As good advice as this is, waiting 10 or 20 for compilation is just sad.

Have you never had a project larger than 10 files?

I use Clojure which have a repl base workflow, I never need to compile anything to test my code and the feedback is instant.

You always compile your function, var, or file before seeing changes in Clojure. But, compilation is usually quite fast since you are linking against precompiled binaries in your dependencies, unlike, for example, header-only sources.

But to say you never compile anything in Clojure is wrong.

Go has spoiled me for the past couple years.

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