Hacker News Reader

Comment by UtMan88 | Hacker News Reader

At Game Jams I would always start things off with my "2 beers, 2 coffees" method. After the theme was announced, we'd go out and discuss ideas over a few beers (just not enough to get trashed), then, come back, flesh stuff out, get our coffee and go back to work. Worked out pretty well for generating some pretty wild ideas while not making ourselves disfunctional.

Drink responsibly.

View on HN

Write drunk, edit buzzed, then?

Beer code tends to forget about edge cases in my experience, so yeah

I never remember to put comments in when I am beer-coding.

Caffeine-code is much easier to follow later.

My weed code is usually really creative but riddled with bugs

Does it help with solving hard problems ?

When you come back sober, the solutions won't make any sense.

Personally, weed might help in the creative phase of problem solving, but if it requires working memory weed is a big negative(at least how it affects me)

I think including some CBD in there negates the memory issues.

I find it's great for diving into refactoring projects that I've been putting off. I like to do that stoned because it's usually not that hard, just tedious moving files around and organizing things. Same way my wife reorganizes the furniture when she gets stoned.

I also sometimes find solutions to hard problems in my head when stoned, though I usually just write down the solution rather than coding it, as large-scale implementations are better done sober.

Yeah, a former colleague of mine told me they used to regularly drink a pint of beer with an evening of coding, until on one occasion they introduced a subtle bug which took them two days to hunt down.

They were working in C, which makes it a lot easier to introduce subtle bugs than most languages, but I certainly think twice about coding while under the influence since I heard that story!

Are we to infer that your colleague hardly ever made subtle bugs?

I can make plenty of those.. and I've never had beer.

That would probably be a reasonable inference. He was one of the sharpest developers I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

Code drunk, commit sober.

I remember reading writing advice somewhere (prose, not code) that suggested you have an alcoholic beverage in the evening for your rough drafts, and then coffee in the morning for your editing. The strategy was: loosen up and then tighten up.

> not enough to get trashed

But enough to reach the Ballmer Peak? https://xkcd.com/323/

Yeah, just enough to slow your brain down and you slide right into flow.

Wouldn't the Ballmer Peak be pretty trashed? I don't really know how well BAC% correlates to drunkenness but that's almost double the legal limit for driving in the US.

It's about 5 'US standard drink's according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content

Which at 18ml ethanol each equates to 9 UK 'units', which is about 3 and half pints or ~90% of a bottle of wine.

Of course 'trashed' or 'drunkenness' both depend on the person, and are subjective anyway, and the time taken to consume them has a big impact too - necking 4 pints is very different to a bottle over the course of a full evening, for example.

But personally no, I don't think I'd program very well in either case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com