Was there any memory or retention of C# and .net at all (e.g. if you tried to learn it later, was it easier to pick up, or was the memory completely gone)?
I'm curious about what happened after, too. Were you rewarded with a raise/promotion, or was there no reward so you moved companies? Faced with an impossible deadline, I've read it's better to just let the deadline slip because it's not worth the burnout or cost to mental health (because few deadlines are truly life-or-death), so I'm wondering whether pushing through was worth it in your case.
It was my business. I was the idiot that signed us up for it - it was kinda out of necessity, as it was for the New York marathon, and their developers had evaporated on them two weeks before a critical deliverable - and we charged blood money for it.
Two things, though.
One, that week does not exist to me. Like, I don’t remember it apart from the abstract knowledge that it happened. I learned C# and .net in the first 48 hours, having never used either before (we were a PHP shop - but some combination of naivety and hubris had us take the project on) - and a few weeks later when making some tweaks, I may as well have been looking at someone else’s code in a language I’d never worked with before.
Two, the comedown wasn’t awful, but I did sleep for about 36 hours straight, and woke up hungry enough to eat a bear.
Haven’t used it since - haven’t needed to - but I do keep a blister pack handy in case I ever find myself needing to function without cessation for a week again.