For me there's a big difference in mental state between "getting it off the ground" and "working on little bug fixes or PRs".

"Getting off the ground" is for me, a great big open-ended architectural decision making process with an ocean of second-guessing myself. It's very very likely to keep me awake for hours reevaluating everything I did in that last couple of hours.

Smaller pieces of work are different. Actually fixing a bug has a fairly well defined "ending" and I can sleep easy basking in the warm glow of satisfaction. Even getting part way through implementing a feature is a thing that doesn't put my brain into "wide open exploration of all possibilities" mode. It's maybe not so easy to bask in achievement and sleep as a quick bug fix, but at least the "code dancing in my head" is a fairly narrow path of implementation I've probably already got the structural problems solved for.

For me - starting projects need empty weekends.

I've put a huge emphasis on sleep in the past year, as someone who used to sleep about 4 hours a night.

I've found that giving myself a solid hour to wind down helps immensely with slowing my brain down and letting me sleep more peacefully. Sometimes I read, or listen to music, or watch youtube, or have a beer or an edible and just hang with out, or just tidy the house or something. Whatever it is, it's not work, it's not in my office, and it's not hard. I've found I've been sleeping far better because of it.

Even on nights that I work super late on some head scratcher, with a full 12-15 hours at my desk, I still give myself the hour before going to bed.

This is how I do it, too. I allocate at least an hour to YouTube (in bed, using my iPad), with the not-super-strict rule to look at content that does not stimulate my mind. Videos about games, or restoration of old computers, are okay for bedtime, videos about e.g. DSP are not.

If my mind is really stimulated, this may feel a bit awkward initially, forcing my mind to "calm down and focus on the video", but at the end of the hour it's usually fine.

And then do not start thinking about a related problem again when you shut the iPad off. I made that mistake so many times.

You've probably heard this but the science says you'll "condition" your mind to sleep better if you associate the bed with just sleeping (and possibly that other thing). But try not to read, watch videos etc for extended periods of time in bed, and you will get naturally wind down and fall into "sleep mode" once you get in bed.

As you get older you can clearly see the effects of lack of sleep on friend’s faces who burned the midnight oil (work/party).

This made me always get the right amount of sleep no matter what.

This is why flexible/remote work time is good. If you need to go late you can but you won’t be punished for it by a 9am standup.

Take Ca+Mg supplements in order to improve sleep and reduce your stress level. It will make you slower at thinking but still functional, and after a few days you can switch back to normal.

For me this formula works like magic because I can't control my mind from constantly iterating when starting new projects so I use this as a chemical brake.

I've started a brain dump prizes at night on a remarkable tablet. It lets me let go of things until three next day.

I do the same with my Boox Note 2, sometimes followed by reading a book on it (with the blue coloured backlight off and only the warm orange one on, it doesn’t annoy my partner with the lights off)

I mostly fast until dinner then I have a 2k calorie meal, I can barely stay awake until 10 pm after a hit like that, the rest of the day I’m super alert, use one super dark 16 oz (no dairy) coffee in the morning for appetite suppression.

Stretching for 15 minutes, less or more, is super.

I have the same issue. If a personal project is fun, I might end up trying to 'just fix this one issue; just polish up this one feature' all the way up to bedtime.

This will invariably affect my sleep with either no sleep at all for 1-2 hours or dreams of fixing an issue over and over again resulting in me being less rested the next day.

I'd love for there to be a quick way to 'snap' out of programming mode but after over a decade of programming I haven't really found one (except for having a couple of pints...).

The dreaming of fixing an issue is funny. You can take advantage of that by stopping when you are stuck. A lot of times your brain will cook up a fix during the night and it will be waiting for you in the morning! I haven't noticed that this makes the sleep less restful either.

I find the surface level of my programming dreams are exceptionally dull (`var a = b + c` for what feels like hours) but yes sometimes a solution to a problem occurs to me early the next day.

That’s my number one problem solving strategy.

  1. Batter my brain
  2. Do something else
  3. Sleep on it
  4. Aha moment

I do it so often, I just say to colleagues that “It’s stewing in the back of my head for a bit” or “Need to sleep on it”.

Before I was fully aware of it, I’d get super disheartened, sleep on it, then come in the next day and nail it by 10.

That’s another thing: if something becomes comical, there’s usually a pattern. If it’s the positive kind of comical, repeat the pattern. If negative, consciously avoid (but that appears comically harder).

You’re right that often times works, but I’ve backtracked on that - to the extent I’ll actively try and dream about something else - an island perhaps.

I’ve come to terms that, for me, hacking into the night, dreaming about solutions, then waking up and implementing them... is manic and deeply unhealthy.

Getting on the bicycle and cruise around does the same thing for me. Without thinking about the problem directly, ideas pop into my mind.

If you haven't tried it yet give note-taking/keeping a (work) diary a shot. Works well to get stuff out of your head and separates work from the sleep.

A few times I've had it affect my dreams. I was working on a toy OS a couple of years back. Similar to the OP I would work on it for a couple of hours every night after my girlfriend went home. One time after I was working on virtual memory I had a dream where I was in memory and there pointers and stuff. It was really weird.

I've definitely had it effect my dreams. But I've also found solutions to bugs by sleeping.

Was there no invalid pointers and double frees in the dream :-)

Maybe waking up was a segfault

It could be worse. Not waking up would be a hard crash.

Yes, maybe out of memory, accidentally killed process id 1

They're really weird, up to being unpleasant (also had them when working on a toy OS, but once I also had an XML related one; cannot recommend).

However, they are downright tortuous if they come as fever dreams (though fever dreams are of course unpleasant no matter what the subject, and are often hard to willingly wake up from, since you're having a fever).

I’ve been having these weird crossover dreams where I’m in this stressful dialogue with myself about some personal problem in my life — but the dream’s visuals are all just code in an IDE window and I’m desperately debugging it to fix the personal problem. It’s pretty crazy.

Ahhhh -bad times, when I was still programming for „fun“. Turned me into a „thinking in code“ zombie that had trouble dealing with people. Really turned my autism dial to max.

This. I used to spend 8+ hours a day coding (yes really) for work then ‘fun’. I often had a hard time around people in real life. It was like my nerves were on high gear and I was awkward and didn’t know when to engage the speech portion of my brain for normal conversation as if I was some observer. After not coding for a decade it’s much better. I can carry a conversation, especially after a beer.

Oh wow that really hits home. What did you switch into? Less technical role or left Software/tech altogether?

Slow migration that just happened over time. I took an architect role that required technical knowledge but about 0% coding. Initially I was disappointed about that but went with it. Eventually I took a pure business role. Along the way I got better with people, still a bit of an introvert but able to fake my way through to an executive role.

Every once in a while I’ll try to code something. I’m able to get by if I want. I get bored with it quick though and it doesn’t bring me the same kind of flow buzz mental stimulation it used to.

I’ve gotta say though, the modern web wtf happened?

React and JSX happened.

Out of curiosity what job did you move to? I'm in almost the exact same boat, extended periods of time working on code lead to an odd mental state.

I am still trapped in the developer role and I don't really see the way out at the moment, but I hate it. I don't program privately at all anymore and I do my best to take on tasks at work that require no programming. If there are straight programming tasks, I just take as much rest as I need, which can be, relative to my normal fulltime working hours, a lot. I have become efficient enough to perform adequately even when doing that.

I've found this too. When I'm knee-deep in code, my brain gets locked into "problem mode" and it can't recompose itself for communicating with others like a normal human being.

I need a good 2-3 hours away from the problem before my brain relaxes and I can actually talk without sounding like I'm stoned or mildly autistic.

Interesting use of quotations, any reason?

It looks like a German username. I’m Dutch: „It’s quite common to quote like this.”

It’s only really for citations, not ‘scare quotes’.

Their closing quotes look inverted though.

It's not quite clear from your last sentence but in any case, for German these „quotation marks“ are completely correct. For printed texts, I personally prefer the »guillemets« variant, they look more even and symmetrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German

Not that you asked, but the «French style» of guillemets is my favourite way to wrap a quotation out of all of them. Unicode has rather too many "quotemarks" and they all sort of run together. The German style of using them strikes me as aesthetically perverse, like the sentence is being pinched, or like a language which uses }braces like this{ !

Little typography nitpicking: the content inside the French quotes is supposed to be separated from the quote symbols by a (non-breaking) space, « like this ».

Interesting different aesthetical preferences voiced in this thread. :-)

As others already said, the French actually use the guillemets with thin spaces but the Swiss use them without.

But the outward pointing of the guillemets looks really odd to me. I like that the inward pointing guillemets basically scream "look at me, I'm a quoted part!".

Real « French style » puts spaces inside (they should be thin spaces).

Yes I am living in the German speaking area, but I have no idea why my browser produced smart quotes when I wrote my original text. Maybe I wrote it in another editor.

I didn't know there was “ AND ”. I hate those fancy/smart quotes. They are not internationally understood and confuse computers and people alike. Just like I wish we would all just speak English, I wish we would all just use """".

Do you mean semantically? I quoted "fun", because it wasn't fun. Diving deep into programming means letting a very specific part of your brain run rampant. The problem solving core of whatever. This hurts all other parts of your brain: especially those for movement and social stuff. I quoted "thinking in code" because it's a meme phrase created by a boy that writes hello world apps and got interviewed on TV -people online use it to make fun of "fake programmers". In the German area we use quotes around words or short phrases to make clear, that we don't mean what we just said. One can also do air quotes. Is that not done in the English speaking world?

Or do you mean the characters? Yes, I am indeed living in the German area and software here often uses those stupid, stupid "smart quotes". I believe we are also taught to write like that on paper. One opens, one closes the quoted phrase. Though I have no idea how this happened here, as right now, in Chrome, I can only produce "normal" quotes. """"

Get up an hour before everyone else and work in the morning

This does not work for me at all. My mind is active in the evening, not so much in the morning. It's already hard enough to get up at a time that morning people still consider to be acceptable, getting up even earlier would effectively take time away, in total.

Different people have different cycles where they are alert and productive. About 2/3 of the population are "larks", most alert in the morning, go through a trough in the arternoon and return to some sort of creative/productive state in the early evening. About 1/3 are owls. They have their trough in the morning, the creative/productive phase during the day and the alert phase in the evening.

It's good to be aware of what type you are and what works for you. Conversely, recommending anyone just gets up earlier may be more harmful than helpful, depending on the person.

Then the trade-off is getting up an hour before I want to start work so that my mind can start moving.

The solution seems obvious. Work completely through the night, then collapse from exhaustion at your convenience! The trick is scoping out your projects appropriately so that you can finish them and catch up on sleep before going completely insane. :-)

Hell, if you do it right, you can watch decades of your life just slip away! amazing!

I've done this a couple of times --- thankfully not for decades. But it's remarkable how much being a code monkey is timeless. You look up and months have passed.

Did that for several years. Basically a 36 hour schedule. Was awesome. Having a family put a stop to that.

My imposter syndrome is lessened by reading this and so many other comments that feel familiar. (Unless I'm up so late because I'm not 10x? Oh no.)

Mornings are for communicating, afternoons and evenings for actually doing stuff.

The most difficult is when it s your day work code.

I m in a phase where the code at work interests me so much that I think I sleep 5 hours a day, the rest I touch that code. Non stop, and I have a kid.

Thank god it s usually just a phase :D

Flip side is when you sleep like a rock, because you can’t get started. My project stalled for the winter months. Now I’ve forsaken television (in favor of a book) just so I can get a 30 minutes to two hours of code time.

Reading in bed is a good transition from active thinking. The book has to be something that strikes a balance between not too exciting, but not unreadably boring.

You could try flipping over to reading a book about Kubernetes. I dare you to stay awake more than 10 minutes.

I get this even with work projects and design ideas. I have to really work to switch off and not think about things.