It's midnight and I really want to be coding. I'm half way or so through
adding a git-annex-shell to git-annex, which will enable some
nice features with ssh access. I've done the research, and written the
documentation[1], laid all the necessary refactoring groundwork,
and written much of the code and just have to connect it all up and test it.
This is a dangerous point to be at, because I have it all in my head, but I'm tired. If I start coding now, I could make a stupid mistake and find myself stuck in a blind alley at 5 am. I've been there before. Even if I avoid hard stuff, I'd surely look up and an hour or more would have gone by, it'd be past 1 am -- and I know that once I stop coding it can take me hours to spin my thoughts back down to the point where I can go to sleep.
Also, I can feel the back of my mind still working on something. Some bits feel like they might not quite mesh up right in my mental model. I don't consciously know what the problem is. I need to sleep on it; it will probably be clearer later. Like yesterday when I lifted a bag of groceries into the car and paused, realizing code I'd written two months ago had a major bug, one I'd never seen, in an edge case that had never came up, but was surely there.
I always assumed that when programmers got older and stopped coding late it was because they couldn't take the strain. Nah. We're just coding even as we sleep. :)
[1] Documentation is where I do my design. This is why git-annex has quantities of documentation that Linux Weekly News finds surprising.
You describe it very well, this sounds familiar to me. I find it very hard to decide to quit when I've almost finished a feature branch. The only thing that sometimes works for me is to avoid starting on something new towards the end of the evening, so I don't fall for this trap. I try to do smaller tedious things, like triaging bugs, instead.
Btw, the links in your RSS feed seem to be referring to gnu.kitenet.net, which I can't resolve. Is there something broken there perhaps?
Yeah, I'm sure part of the problem has been coding in haskell, which knocks my productivity down, so I started the feature branch at noon, not in the evening, and still wasn't done. ;)
Re "gnu", interesting breakage. Looks like I must have typoed sometime and used the ikiwiki setup file of my laptop, which is only available on IPv6. Anyhow, fixed.