All nighters...

I've started listening to podcasts from the PBS series NerdTv  and today I was listening to a conversation with Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of Paypal. who had just been through his third all-nighter - that week. He said it was not unusual for him to do this, and some people like all-nighters and some don't. (An all-nighter is when you work through the night on some problem, or coding thing - in Microserfs it was referred to as a "Trip To Australia".)

I have only done a handful of all-nighters, but there is something about the level of productivity you can achieve - though for me its spotty, there is a time where I am very hyper-focussed and productive, then at some point you hit the wall and push on through, and I'm not sure of the quality of code after that point.

He also mentioned working weekends in the same way.

I think one of the biggest reasons that working all-nighters (and to a lesser extend, weekenders) can be productive is that a lot less people or things interrupt you. Its easier to stay "in the zone" with no phone, email, messaging, TV, co-workers, bosses, yadda yadda (the last all-nighter I did was with Joel, and I told him to go to sleep about 3:30 am).

In some ways, I'd like to have two summer vacations a year - one with my family, and one where I send them somewhere without me, and I hole up somewhere and code on my pet project for two weeks (it's been too long since I've had a pet coding project).

In a recent DotNetRocks show, Carl Franklin was talking to David Smith, writer of btSharp (a BitTorrent client written in C# 2.0), and David told of a time when he was coerced into an all-nighter by having a benefactor deliver four pizzas and six large bottles of Mountain Dew to his dorm room late one evening. (The benefactor was Carl Franklin.)