Get Up And Walk Around moments
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You don't get up and walk around after you shot yourself in the foot. Please be consistent! :laugh:
Mircea
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I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
My moment was in a complicated mathematical computation. Was getting wrong results for about a week. Then one afternoon was debugging when I saw that a minus sign was keyed in as a plus sign. After that fix, all results became correct.
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I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
YES! and like you when in the middle of a particularly annoying problem. I actually begin fantasying about what the get up and walk around is going to be like. It is particularly fun when I have "budgeted" lets say 8 hours to fix something and have a moment of brilliance and solve in an hour or so. I almost always take an hour or so to bask in my walking around moment. I barely ever take the full 7 I have allotted myself. It is a wonderful feeling.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
Certainly! I recognize the feeling, and the action, very well. I'll take the opportunity to tell of two other ways of reacting to a victory. This was a math problem, but it might as well have been an algorithmic one: In preparation for the math finals, two of my University classmates, Jon and Berit, were solving problems from the finals of previous years. Berit was the undisputed #1 in academic results, less so in self confidence. Jon was the other way around - certainly so for the confidence part. For one problem, they got stuck, couldn't make out how to solve the problem. So rather than locking up each other's way of attacking it, they agreed to split, sit at separate tables apart from each other, trying to solve the problem alone. And so it happened that they both 'saw the light' at the very same moment. And Jon exclaimed: Boy, am I smart! And Berit exclaimed: Boy, have I been dumb! (Those who know them both, says: Right! - That is just like both of them.) After Jon told me of this episode, with a laugh, I asked Berit if it was true. She looked down, and nodded: I guess that is exactly what happened ...
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I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
Anymore I look out the window and thank God in heaven for helping me, then run off to facebook to see what the rest of the world has been up to, play some phone solitaire and just be "analog" for a while before perusing the bug log to see what one will be next on the pole.
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I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
BBar2 wrote:
a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not
Ah, memories of Microsoft 'C' 6.0 back in the MS-DOS days. They didn't implement the
volatilekeyword, and their optimizer would move what looked like loop-invariant code outside a loop. Made for a dandy interrupt service debugging experience. I had to disable optimization entirely.BBar2 wrote:
Do you have other victory rituals?
I do the get up and walk around bit too. I wander around for a bit and then come back and make really sure I've fixed the problem.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Absolutely :thumbsup: a bit like how a deer shakes after having escaped danger the walk around gets the adrenalin out of the system.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
GuyThiebaut wrote:
a deer shakes after having escaped danger the walk around gets the adrenalin out of the system
I see the same thing in my greyhound. After he's run zoomies for a couple of minutes, he walks around shaking and blowing for a while. Even at almost ten years old, he can still get up to around 25 mph (racers at their peak can do 40+ mph).
Software Zen:
delete this; -
GuyThiebaut wrote:
a deer shakes after having escaped danger the walk around gets the adrenalin out of the system
I see the same thing in my greyhound. After he's run zoomies for a couple of minutes, he walks around shaking and blowing for a while. Even at almost ten years old, he can still get up to around 25 mph (racers at their peak can do 40+ mph).
Software Zen:
delete this; -
My moment was in a complicated mathematical computation. Was getting wrong results for about a week. Then one afternoon was debugging when I saw that a minus sign was keyed in as a plus sign. After that fix, all results became correct.
Reminds me of when I took the computer graphics class in college. I had been debugging a 3D clipping algorithm for a week, and it kept failing in a weird way. One night, after I'd been in the lab for almost 40 hours straight (yes, I was insane back then), I went out to the hallway with a listing and stretched it out on the floor. I looked at it for a couple hours, chain-smoking (I was also stupid back then) the whole time. I finally got up and started walking the hallways. After about ten minutes, the thought occurred to me to check my variable names against the original algorithm. I had used the names the algorithm used, which were unfortunately single lower-case characters. In one place, I had typed a 'b' instead of an 'h', both of which were variables in the algorithm. Go look at your keyboard; I'll wait.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Of course, I'm talking about the dog, 2nd fastest land animal on Earth (1st is the cheetah). They can accelerate from a standstill to 40 mph in six strides. Retired racers make great pets; "world's fastest couch potato" is a common description :-D .
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Of course, I'm talking about the dog, 2nd fastest land animal on Earth (1st is the cheetah). They can accelerate from a standstill to 40 mph in six strides. Retired racers make great pets; "world's fastest couch potato" is a common description :-D .
Software Zen:
delete this;Obviously! :-) 0 to 40mph in six strides, that is something. Did you ever calculate the acceleration in terms of g load? And also, how much kinetic energy does he gain in those six strides, in how short time - or in other words, how many watts of effect does he produce to do that acceleration? Animals can display some amazing capabilities, and if you sit down and do the math, it sometimes goes from amazing to truly unbelievable.
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Obviously! :-) 0 to 40mph in six strides, that is something. Did you ever calculate the acceleration in terms of g load? And also, how much kinetic energy does he gain in those six strides, in how short time - or in other words, how many watts of effect does he produce to do that acceleration? Animals can display some amazing capabilities, and if you sit down and do the math, it sometimes goes from amazing to truly unbelievable.
trønderen wrote:
Did you ever calculate the acceleration in terms of g load?
No, but he develops considerable momentum (he weighs around 75 pounds). When we first got him it took a while to find a fencing contractor, so we put him outside on a steel cable attached to a tree to use the bathroom. We bought a collar that included plastic hardware, but was guaranteed for large dogs - 100 pounds and up. One day he caught sight of a cat, took off running, reached the end of the cable, and did not stop. The collar hardware shattered and off he went. Fortunately I was watching and chased off after him. The good news was he still needed to pee and when he stopped to do that I caught up to him.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
My moment was in a complicated mathematical computation. Was getting wrong results for about a week. Then one afternoon was debugging when I saw that a minus sign was keyed in as a plus sign. After that fix, all results became correct.
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Reminds me of when I took the computer graphics class in college. I had been debugging a 3D clipping algorithm for a week, and it kept failing in a weird way. One night, after I'd been in the lab for almost 40 hours straight (yes, I was insane back then), I went out to the hallway with a listing and stretched it out on the floor. I looked at it for a couple hours, chain-smoking (I was also stupid back then) the whole time. I finally got up and started walking the hallways. After about ten minutes, the thought occurred to me to check my variable names against the original algorithm. I had used the names the algorithm used, which were unfortunately single lower-case characters. In one place, I had typed a 'b' instead of an 'h', both of which were variables in the algorithm. Go look at your keyboard; I'll wait.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
When I hit a snag and have no idea what else to try, I usually get, take a walk outside and when I return, I normally have some idea of what to try next, etc, until it's solved and time for a bourbon on the rocks.
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When I hit a snag and have no idea what else to try, I usually get, take a walk outside and when I return, I normally have some idea of what to try next, etc, until it's solved and time for a bourbon on the rocks.
Did you ever try to explain the problem to your rubber duck? I, and many others, can tell you that it works! A slightly modified variation: Write the documentation for it. Both the user/API documentation explaining how it is intended to be used, and the detailed maintenance documentation, explaining the data structures and the processing logic. Besides: Then the documentation is there, when someone asks for it! For non-programming stuff, I have been using a further slightly modified way. I really never thoroughly understood how a gyro works. How a heat pump works. How genetics and inheritance works. The chemistry of a battery ... So in my imagination, I keep alive gang of smart junior high school kids in a "Young Scientist Club" giving presentations of various stuff to their schoolmates. As I gradually learn more about a topic, I write it down as these young people's 'lecture' to their schoolmates - including the questions they receive from their audience when something is not clear. The rubber duck is a children's toy. A child needs to have things explained simply and clearly, yet in a correct manner. And you must be prepared for (sometimes shockingly) logic questions about why and how. Pretending that your rubber duck is that oh, so logic kid asking 'why' is a great help. Letting them materialize as an audience, and forcing that simple and clear explanation into a kid's presentation is mostly a way of 'formalizing' it, but for me, it has great value. This is an excellent way to force yourself to really get a thorough basic understanding, extract the fundamental ideas in a simple way, making sure that all you say (while impersonating one of the "young scientists") is correct, even if in a simple form. And the question part pinpoints what you have not yet mastered: I write down, as question from the audience, all those nasty 'sorry, I do not have a good answer to that', and then keep up my search for information on the field so that I can provide and answer. I rewrite 'lectures' all the time: If I manage to express my newly acquired understanding in simple terms, it goes into the basic presentation, but to keep the presentation at the simple level, some advanced parts must be kept as question/answer. It it definitely a goal to get as much as possible into such simple terms that they can be included in the basic presentation. This is a great way of learning, in a way that ensures that you really understand the problem completely, that you know how to bring your understanding
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Of course, I'm talking about the dog, 2nd fastest land animal on Earth (1st is the cheetah). They can accelerate from a standstill to 40 mph in six strides. Retired racers make great pets; "world's fastest couch potato" is a common description :-D .
Software Zen:
delete this;They are amazing to watch when they do zoomies, we have a few rescues (ex racers) that walk the beach with us in the morning, poor bloody labs just watch on in consternation of the flying streaks as they tear up and down the sand having a great time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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trønderen wrote:
Did you ever calculate the acceleration in terms of g load?
No, but he develops considerable momentum (he weighs around 75 pounds). When we first got him it took a while to find a fencing contractor, so we put him outside on a steel cable attached to a tree to use the bathroom. We bought a collar that included plastic hardware, but was guaranteed for large dogs - 100 pounds and up. One day he caught sight of a cat, took off running, reached the end of the cable, and did not stop. The collar hardware shattered and off he went. Fortunately I was watching and chased off after him. The good news was he still needed to pee and when he stopped to do that I caught up to him.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
One day he caught sight of a cat, took off running, reached the end of the cable, and did not stop.
We may be sidetracking quite a bit here, but ... My dogs, several years ago, were great teddy bears, but not exactly greyhounds ... They were St.Bernhards, 75-80 kg (and at that time, that was lightweight, for a St.Bernhard!). My first dog of course couldn't follow a cat making twists and turns, but he could get into speed down a straight street. He did, getting into considerable speed. The cat jumped into a lawn, and he followed. The lawn had an area protected by a dense fir hedgerow. The cat flew under it. My 80 St.Bernhard tried to do the same. The earth shook. It is a great wonder none of the the hedge firs were pulled up by the root. Anyone claiming that animals have no feelings, can feel no shame, have never seen my dog that day. His tail was so tightly pressed against his belly that the tip almost reached his mouth. He refused to look me in the eye for at least an hour or two, searching for corners where he could hide. I guess our laughs (we did laugh!) didn't improve matters. But after all, we were his pack, so he gradually realized that our comforting strokes were honest signs of unity and support, and he relaxed. I believe that this episode was essential to strengthen the bonds between him and us as a pack. OK, so we did laugh when it happened, but he showed his feelings to us, and we clearly signaled: Yet you are one of us! We are still accepting you, we will comfort you. Straighten up, you are a good boy!
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Of course, I'm talking about the dog, 2nd fastest land animal on Earth (1st is the cheetah). They can accelerate from a standstill to 40 mph in six strides. Retired racers make great pets; "world's fastest couch potato" is a common description :-D .
Software Zen:
delete this;Sleeps up to 20 hours a day, runs like s**t off a shovel. Sighthounds are great.
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I’m a 60 year old coder. I’ve been doing it since I was 20. I always knew I loved it, but I just realized I truly do it for the get-up-and-walk-around moment. That’s the moment when you fix a sneaky bug, or complete a demanding or tricky task/algorithm/approach. It’s so satisfying, that you can’t simply move on to the next thing. You have to get up and walk around to bask in the satisfaction. I’m chasing a get up and walk around worthy bug in a bit of embedded C++ at the moment. It’s a timer fringe case, or a variable the should be volatile, and it’s not. I’ll get it, and I’ll certainly need to get-up-and-walk-around once it’s dead. Has anyone else recognized the need to get-up-and-walk-around after a truly satisfying coding moment? Do you have other victory rituals?
Sure, there's a whole proces. For me often like this: Agitation, walking around and most succesfully, going to the toilet, the idea hits home in a double relief, anticipation walking back to confirm and often yeah, Victory! Then, a bit of an inward, not seeing much, complete rest, hardly a heartbeat and feeling good.
