๐Ÿ‘ฝ sdfgeoff

Ignoring coffee, table tennis and window watching, I reckon that a programmers time is:

70% reading research material

20% thinking really hard

5% trying to remember how the solution you implemented yesterday worked (you're sure you saved a backup to VC, but....)

5% writing new code that doesn't work

<0.1% writing code that ends up being used (for the next few months)

For reference over the past three /days/ at a fulltime programming job I've got ~50 lines of code (LOC) ready for review. It's supported by ~500 LOC that I've knowlingly discarded (dead end solutions), probably >2000 LOC that I wrote that never worked at all (compile errors/), 2 pages of written documentation/decision making, and ~5 pages of (typed) scribbled notes.

What do you reckon your ratios are like?

11 months ago

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๐Ÿ‘ฝ marginalia

(2) At home, say when working on my search engine I'm about probably 60% writing code and 30% trying to figure out why the code I wrote doesn't work (and 10% repairing the tests I broke). With some exceptions. Some pieces of code are just 99% staring at code trying to figure out why it isn't behaving well, and 1% slapping my forehead and going "well duh!". But that's usually complicated bit twiddling stuff. ยท 11 months ago

๐Ÿ‘ฝ marginalia

Really depends on what I'm doing. (1) At work I'm probably 70% trying to find the code that's causing the bug (in some far-off library maintained by, well, that's what I'm trying to figure out), 20% trying to repair unit tests and 10% writing new code. ยท 11 months ago

๐Ÿ‘ฝ isoraqathedh

For me, if code that I've written/copied off of some other part of the program that eventually makes it in is 10 parts, then code that I chucked out is 25 parts, me banging my head on a solution is 75 parts, reading other bits of code for solutions is 150 parts and background digesting of thoughts is ~375 parts. Sometimes I get confused about what I was originally doing and have to spend some more time recovering from that too. ยท 11 months ago