The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-Lapse

I agree. I hope once the haze has settled he has to maintain this code.

Thanks for the tip. I actually just got a second monitor (third screen) but wasn't able to time-lapse it, so for this week I was unbalanced mostly looking at just one of the screens. I shall now rearrange my gaze targets.

Yes, most people aren't Nick Winter, and shouldn't be doing 60 hours a week. He is a self-improvement machine. His ebook "The Motivation Hacker", which I highly recommend, explains how he does it. http://www.nickwinter.net/the-motivation-hacker

I used an adjustable-height standing/sitting desk, so I was standing maybe 40% of the time. I agree, I can't imagine doing it seated the whole time.

Here's the code: https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger

I initially wrote it as an self-tracking activity logger with no interface, but when I went to do the time-lapse video, I added the HUD UI and made it save screenshots at regular intervals. The HUD is actually showing on my screen at all times, so it gets included in the screenshots. From those screenshots, I just used ffmpeg to compile a video.

I haven't written this for anyone else to run it, but if you're running Mavericks, you could try! You'd probably want to cut out some of the stuff, like the part that shows the work graphs from my website.

The stats get recorded by all of the TPTracker*.m code. For keystrokes and mouse movements, you just ask to get notified of all system events (the user has to enable assistive access for Telepath). For window switches, light levels, and webcam, you have to poll. GitHub, Trello, and Gmail are polling web APIs, reading the API keys from stupid config files in Dropbox. For tracking how many builds I've done, I wrote a hacky brunch plugin: https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-brunch .

Current music comes from iTunes/Spotify distributed notifications, simple. Work hours and happiness/energy/health come from distributed notifications sent out by a Python script that parses my Emacs org mode files where I record these things whenever I save those files with Emacs after-save-hooks. So those would be unusable unless you were to modify the code to get some other way of doing happiness and mood. Same with the rightmost section: a web view showing the percentile feedback work graph from my website is not easily transferrable.

sounds like the upper bound of a data type to me.

Why?

This is the graph: http://www.nickwinter.net/codecombat-stats. It is a percentile feedback work graph, indicating what fraction of the day so far you have been working on something productive, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, but because so much was getting shifted around and refactored and added. I don't think any more bugs were introduced than if he'd done the work over a two or three week period. He spent a good portion of that week refactoring a particularly old and central piece of code, and he spent the better part of the weekend fixing bugs both old and new. So overall I believe we're ahead.

It's actually cheaper to have two desks, two monitors, two keyboards and mice. Especially if you already extra gear lying around. I have this setup at work and find it faster/easier than an adjustable desk.

Those are screensavers, actually. Looks like he did almost nothing but code last week during his waking hours.

Interesting question. I guess it all depends on how much he jumps around between files and different parts of files.

There's a scene in Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson which is similar to this problem. The protagonist is in jail with a laptop which has the location of treasure on it encrypted by a WWII Enigma machine. However, the bad guys can see his screen at all times, so he needs to write the code to crack the cipher without looking at the data. I won't spoil how he does it because I recommend reading the book.

We're planning on open sourcing the whole site in the future anyway, so you'll be able to get your hands on it directly soon enough!