Don’t Pull An All-Nighter

I've pulled all-nighters for star parties. Takes a while to get back on schedule, but it's been worth it.

However, the thesis is that an all-nighter is bad for the project. Unfortunately, the author mixes up an occasional all-nighter ("just this once") with frequent all-nighters ("If you are at a point where you are working 24 hours a day"), and without making a distinction between the two.

The problem with this is that I personally can point to cases where an all-nighter worked - we added a couple of new features leading up to a demo at a supercomputing conference, and stayed up all night the night before leaving. They worked, and we scheduled in time to clean up the code.

The author calls out to "design" (by which I assume he means evolutionarily designed), but omits cases like the story of Cliff Young, and the influence on all-nighters for ultra-marathons. Clearly the best solution in that case is to not sleep, and I will argue there are evolutionary reasons why we can do that.

I don't pull all nighters on purpose, but if I have insomnia anyway I'll sometimes spend a while coding before trying to get to sleep again.