Why Code At Nights?

“Programmers are people who turn caffeine to code” is a popular one(not my fault if you haven’t heard it) and if you ever get to ask anyone who have had to meet a horrible deadline or churn out lines of source codes for a side project after a lot of drudgery at work or school when their productivity is highest, the probability of getting “late into the nights” for an answer is smoking HIGH!

So what’s with the staying up at nights and typing crazily into the computer, something that looks more like the English alphabet version of hieroglyphs? Everyone may give you varying answers but here, it comes down to three things – Nothing like Midnight snacks, The Maker’s schedule and The darker, the better.

Nothing like midnight snacks

I don’t do that “2:00am meals are unhealthy” stuffs – It’s just snacks by the way. And according to a quora user, you get the happiest person on Earth when you combine a programmer with a WELL stocked kitchen/fridge. I mean, who doesn’t value all that cute Nutella dishes, leftover sandwiches and what not…?

The Maker’s Schedule

On average, this point actually boost the self-esteem of every programmer by a factor of (greater than or equal to) 37. Paul Graham wrote about the Maker’s Schedule in 2009. Basically they are two types of schedule, the traditional manager schedule – where your day is cut up into hours and a three second call from your wife at home costs you about an hour’s worth of time.

On the second hand is the gruesome Maker’s Schedule – which is what most of us who make stuffs goes with (at nights). Knowing where that semi-colon you omitted should have been (Thank you swift) requires an extra-ordinary commitment of mind and body and as a result, a programmer just can’t commit these huge mental investment except he can be guaranteed a couple of ‘distraction-free’ hours.

Thing is, no matter how strong your attempt at refactoring or actually writing codes is during the day, that clingy girl friend or the cursed and noisy next-door neighbour or worse still, the endless of stream of board meetings and important stuffs to tend to will never allow it?

The Darker the Better

At nights, everything is darker including our brains! These leaves the only shining light that the coder ever needs – his laptop screen. You may be wondering why a dark (blurry I mean) brain will want to decipher complex algorithms when it should be resting. Well, the brain is forced to focus on one thing when it is just too tired to be distracted. Ordinarily, I’m supposed to be hyper-productive after I must have lined my stomach with about three bottles of Rush but Hell NO! Those drinks just make me hyper-active NOT hyper-productive. One minute am reading Quora, the next I am on Twitter and the next microsecond is split between Techcrunch, and ProjectNaija. At nights, my internet magically goes into oblivion and my loyalty is bestowed or fighting Heisenbug.

 And the “no lights” thing? I will just say, same reason you choose to have sex at nights when you should be resting. Why do you ask friend?

To crown it all, I code at nights because it removes the time limit on when I have to stop working and figure out other life’s bull so I get pretty relaxed.