I'm one of those people who has a very hard time shutting my brain down at night. Quite often that means the only time I get sleep is once my body is exhausted enough that it just shuts itself down. This weekend was one of those weekends. On Friday, I worked late on some debugger stuff, but ran into a flaw with my design. So Lis and I hung out, had some dinner, etc. Then, about 11pm I realized the solution to my problem. So into the office I went and I pounded my solution out. About 2am was when I finally finished the feature, and so I decided I'd go to bed. But instead of sleeping, I pondered a few other debugger problems. About 4am I figured out that I could do a couple of really powerful features really easily due to the way the debugger is designed. Uh oh.
Saturday morning, about 11am I started working on the new features I thought about at 4am. Turns out I was right, they were really easy. And are going to make people's lives much easier. Yay!
The whole weekend turned out this way though. I swear that I spent maybe 10% of my time sleeping, and about 35% of my time not thinking about programming related stuff. So over half of my weekend was spent not relaxing.
Lis gives me crap for playing WoW a bunch lately. But I've noticed that it's one way in which I'm able to turn my brain off. I can't do it while out having dinner or watching a movie, etc. I need something mindless to really shut down. This isn't an exceptional thing, btw. It's happened before. But it's also not a constant thing. It tends to only happen when I'm stressed about something, and working on something fun and exciting. The stress causes me to not want to think about what's stressing me, and the fun and exciting thing is what my brain wants to think about instead.
You are in St Cloud.....RB is in Austin....how does it work? BTW, you sound very like me with the sleep thing....just can't switch off!
It works -- I guess I have more problems *not* working than anything else. ;-) I spend plenty of time on the phone/AIM discussing various things with other engineers. Meetings are a nice time to get the dishes done. And so on. :-P
While I haven't tried WoW, I know that if I play many other types of games, my brain starts to try and figure something out about the game when I try and sleep afterwards. Like "How can I get to such and such a place?" or "I wonder how they did that feature" or "Gee, I really liked that music.. I wonder why". And if I start reading something more interesting then I am up for hours researching.
Nice to know I'm not the only one who can't just "shut down" and go to sleep automaticaly. My wife, and she just can't understand why I stay up late reading Star Wars novels or playing games. Here's my sleepy blog entry: http://bradrhine.org/posts/NineMinutes.php.
You're not alone. I also work at home and it's not unusual to get up after trying to sleep for more than one hour and go back to work - when this happens, I only go back to bed again when I'm starting to get physically exhausted.
Aaron I know what you mean, I can become so possessed by a project that it keeps me from sleeping too. Come to think of it, it keeps me from doing ANYTHING other than programming which can be problematic with friends and family. :(
BTW jdiwnab I agree with you, if I play games just before going to bed I usually end up getting stuck thinking about the game and problem solving with it instead of sleeping.
Oh, before I forget, Aaron, since you are working on the debugger, I found an oddity in the latest version of RB. On Mac, if you have a FOR EACH object IN objectArray and you drop into the debugger. If you step through to loop the debugger ONLY returns the first object in the array. Say there are 6 of my custom object in the array, in the debugger it looks like there are six copies of the first object, even if each one is different.
Cheers!
@SerKevin -- Be sure to file a bug report about it so it gets looked at (and attach an example that demonstrates the issue).