Ask HN: What was the longest period you had to continuously code?

About 20 hours solid, in a very high pressure deadline, with a lot of money on the table.

1 day beforehand was spent doing research, reading source code, devising strategy.

Next day (+ well into the following day) 20 hours solid development in Python and C++

After that it was deployed to 530 servers worldwide and went live immediatly.

Functioned perfectly. No bugs.

I was exhausted after that, it took me 3-4 days to recover.

Why do people bother with this like it's some kind of badge of honour just to reward C-level bonuses and pick up a few scraps they'll pitifully throw down to you... it's bizarrely masochistic.

Forty hours from bed to bed. Maybe an hour nap. So about 38 hours including throwing up before I went to sleep. I was nineteen. All for a stupid video game that 'had' to ship.

Probably 7 hours straight. It was for an optimized C++ class that I took in my grad program and the particle system project was due. I had bad time management but I was also not t hat familiar with C++ (I knew the basics but not things like SIMD or bit-shifting) so it took longer than others. At the end of the day, I was able to get the particle system working and optimized but it wasn't as up to par as some of the other people in the class and I got a C

15 hours solving a minor HTTP request on a pet project.I had t sleep at 5 AM because I was feeling guilty because of morning brightness.It happens a lot of times to me and it's annoying because I abandon many things.

30 hours (6 chemexes of coffee, half a bottle of Jameson, a metric tonne of general tsos chicken, and a cat nap about 10 hours before the deadline). Grad school, paper deadline, complete overhaul of our core algorithm. Paper got in a few months later, slept for 16 hours the next day. Woke up at 7 and walked to the coffee shop at the corner, the employees thought I was weird for buying a coffee. It was 7pm not 7am!

I did a small (6-8 teams) 48 hour game jam that I wrote code almost continuously throughout. I had about 4 hours of sleep in the middle of it, and an hour or two for eating. The rest was writing code. The code was game jam quality (that is to say not very high), but the game itself was pretty fun and we ended up placing second overall.

16 hours. It was a hackathon, I built a mobile app with mocked interactions and flashy UI.

9 hours. Just last weekend, had to build a system to migrate production database data to another db with different schema, right before a very-short-notice-yet-important QA.

I did a solid 24 hour session yesterday. Writing an integration with a British bank for my startup (https://twitter.com/stevegraham/status/831501656734982145). I had no external pressure to do so, I just didn't want to finish until I got it done. I could have carried on afterwards but I thought it was probably best to sleep at that point.

72 hours, I literally passed out 2-3 times for 15 minutes or so.

My boss had me working on every project except the one that the whole foundation of the business was being built upon, until 3 days before our opening trade show. I paid the price and learned a very valuable lesson about the employee/employer relationship. I now refuse to work more than 40 hours per week.

26 hours. We took 30 minutes to eat dinner and watch 30 Rock.

We were up against a deadline from the Defense Department. One we didn't know about until the day before it was due. The product owner dropped the ball on this one.

We did complete it. Sadly (and not really a surprise) there were other problems with the contract we had with them and the deal/partnership was dissolved.

16 hours, multiple times. Sometimes no bugs/clean deployment, other times a lot of re-work.