Imagine you had 6 hours of quiet, no place to go and wifi. What would you do that would make you smarter and better?
First, A story
My family and I are travelling for a few months now, and in the last 2 months we stayed and traveled in Vietnam. Last week we went took a trip from Sa Pa in north Vietnam, to Hanoi, the capital city, was in a bus with 30 beds, from 10 PM until 4 AM.
The drive took 6 hours, it was night and everyone were sleeping. The bus was quiet, dark, and warm. Because it was late at night – no one used his phone to talk . Without any ability to go out, or even sit up (there’s no sit, only a bed), I found that it was a good place to concentrate my thoughts.
If you haven’t been in one (I haven’t until a few days ago), this is a sleeper bus from the inside:
photograph by Ecow, distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license.
That made me think. Is this what I need order to concentrate?
Working in a company, in an office, many hours are spent on meetings, talking to other developers. having coffee X 3, code reviewing, discussing new features, planning next sprints, doing one-on-ones.
Therefore, It is hard to find time to sit, put on my headphones, and enter the concentration zone in my mind.
Finding a significant amount of time to think and work (code in my case) is a even harder.
But, in the sleeper bus – there were no meetings, I couldn’t sleep because of the slope of the road, and there were no distractions. Only if I had my laptop with me…
What if I had those 6 hours to myself, with no interruptions, no way to be tempted to go out for coffee, and a laptop? To answer that question, and hear ideas from others, I here by declare The 6-hours-in-a-sleeper-bus programming challenge.
What is the best thing that can be done (and worth doing) in 6 hours?
Some rules: no sleeping, no Facebook , no Netflix (a hard one, I know), and it has to be somehow related to programming. Or at least something that won’t be a complete waste of time.
Here is my list, What would YOU do?
I couldn’t resist putting some not-code related things here, there are just too good.
Top Not-software related things to do in 6 hours:
- Read the IMDB pages for every participant in the cast of the series OZ. First time I saw this series I was in high school, and every character there terrified me. Except from the episode where Luke Perry was a priest there. Where did Adabisy go? If there’s time left binge through the first episodes again.
- Cleanup my gmail inbox, and go over my 6,785 unread emails, unsubscribing from a million websites. I swear, I did it a month ago and it took me about 6 hours. Not the most interesting task, but it worth it.
Top software related things to do in 6 hours
Read:
- Google and see what the world thinks today is better – React, Vue or Angular. I guess it changed from yesterday. That’s less than 6 hours read, but the reading the comments might take a while 🙂
- As a CSS fan, that feels that there’s a lot of voodoo out there, browse the css-tricks.com website as if it was a book, from start to end. There’s always something interesting there to learn.
- Re-read Peopleware by Tom DeMarco , an old but great book about the connection between people and the software they create (maybe a subject for another post). This book opened my eyes about the huge importance of the human factor in the success of technical software project, and was one of my first reads as a manager.
Do:
- Choose a language I don’t know and didn’t code in before (Ruby?) and start doing codewars challenges in that language. Is it possible to learn a new language in 6 hours? **codewars, if you are not familiar, is a platform that allows you to choose a programming languages and solve programming challenges in different levels. They have a ranking system that motives you to keep going. I have no affiliation to them, to be clear.
- Learn how to build a chrome extension, maybe one that shows the amount of time I spend on social networks. Something that I always wanted to do. One of my team mates created a great extension in a hackathon we had, maybe I would recreate it.
- Write this blog post. Or at least imagining how it will look like.
- Making my projects better, even demo ones like the one explained here – go over the linting, variable names, comments for methods, indentation and formatting.
- Integrate a test coverage tool into my project to show which parts don’t have any tests, the first stage of increasing the test coverage! If you are a testing fan, you might find this interesting.
- Prepare a webinar about MongoDB (because everybody should love databases). I love teaching, and preparing a webinar is a new medium for me to learn.
That was my list.
Conclusion:
Finding time to concentrate is a hard task, sometimes it can be found only in a very specific setting. For me it was the sleeper bus. For others, the day they work from home, a specific coffee shop or the office.
This was my list of things that could take up to 6 hours (like my bus tour), will be fun and interesting to do and will contribute to me.
How would your list look like? Please share on the comments below 🙂