Ask HN: What do you do during the dead time while programming?

2 points·selrond··8 comments

All those times, when you need to wait a couple of minutes to build / compile stuff, but starting to work on something in between is not worth it / impractical, but still - you don't want to get completely distracted, so you can jump right back quickly - what do you do?

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I typically use the time to write - my thoughts, ideas and notes of all sorts - which are directly or indirectly relevant to whatever it is I'm working on at the time. That's how I find problems worth solving. There are opportunities hiding in everything we do every day. All it takes is a portion of our time dedicated to thinking and synthesis of information from various sources.

flip to an open HN tab, I used to flip to reddit, but I've blocked reddit now - wasted to much time.

in fact, this thread was a product of dead time

I waste time by drawing, browsing HN or (more recently) dev.to.

I have a hard time reading anything on dev.to TBH, I find it's way too pop-culture-unicorns-everywhere for how pragmatic programming is (should be?) in its essense

I like the community-driven development of forem, but aaaall those posts about only nodejs stuff are starting to be boring.

Like if webdev is nodejs only. I struggle to find anything good about django :/

Was in the same boat about Django online. The current community forum is pretty good, and I'm also subscribed to Django News for the regular updates. Really good resource. https://django-news.com/

Edit: And the Django Chat podcast is really good too

In fact, I discovered Django News when they included a package I created (https://django-news.com/issues/30 − at the bottom of the page) :D

Now, I subscribed to their newsletter (and to their dev.to account too).

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