coding
I’m 37, and I’ve been a (professional) developer for 16 years. You would have thought that in that time, I’d have figured out an effective work style which delivered the desired outcomes (code cut, products shipped etc) without causing detrimental knock-on effects - but, sadly, you’d be wrong. I think the style in which I practiced my craft for the first 15 years of my career was much the same as every other enthusiastic developer: you put a ton of hours in.
My friend Damien was blogging about his early experiences with computers & programming yesterday, and it reminded me of how I got started. Specifically, it reminded me of an influential magazine I read at the time called “Input”, which taught BASIC programming for the ZX Spectrum and BBC. It was a short-lived, esoteric British thing, but I was astonished to find that not only does Wikipedia have a page on it, but they also linked a TV advert of it which has been lovingly archived on YouTube:
This has bugged me on and off for a while - very, very occasionally I’d be working away in Visual Studio and suddenly my @ symbols would start coming out as double-quotes, a symptom of the condition known as ‘crazy Yankee keyboard syndrome’. I hadn’t figured out what triggered this, especially as all other applications were unaffected, and it happened little enough, and when I was busy enough, that I didn’t take time to find the cause and just lived with it until I restarted VS.