Upcoming Maniac Week

Starting Monday morning at 04:00, and ending the next Monday at 03:59, I'm going to see how many hours of CodeCombat development I can do in one week. Not "hours at the office" (I work from home), not "hours on the computer doing productive things", but "hours on the computer developing CodeCombat". So I'll count things like writing code, building levels, writing documentation for said code and levels, etc., but not things like responding to CodeCombat emails or planning the business or meetings. I just won't do those things this week.

I spontaneously did a how-much-can-I-work week last year when I was deep into the Skritter iOS app and got 87.3 hours of general Skritter work. It was extremely fun, so I thought I'd do it again, but this time I've prepared for it. I've planned my meals, laid out my clothes, started waking up early, blocked email, bought an adjustable height sitting/standing desk, and readied other ridiculous preparations such as a stack of twenty bars of 90% dark chocolate.

I'm going to make a time lapse video of the whole week with no post-processing except for adding a music track. So if you're at all interested in seeing what it looks like to code this much, look for the video next Monday (or maybe Tuesday if I'm that tired afterward.) I adapted some open-source self-tracking software I wrote to serve as a time lapse heads-up-display dashboard thing that'll be more interesting to look at during the video than just my screen.

The time lapse will be fun for me and help keep me honest, since presumably at least a few people will watch the whole six minutes and would heckle me if I counted beastskills.com as work. I find it exhilarating to think about focusing deeply on code for a week with no distractions and overdosing on motivation to push deeper into the zone than I've ever gone before. (I hope that's what will happen.)

I intend for this to serve as my all-time record for hours really worked, so if you spot any loopholes that need clarification in advance, post a comment.

Also, if you want to guess how many hours I'll end up with (there are 168 hours in a week*), post a comment. Winner is closest-without-going-over. Choose a number before reading other comments.

Oh yeah! The main point of this post is to explain why you won't be able to reach me next week, even in the event of a bearpocalypse. You can watch my live CodeCombat development graph, though.

* Note that unlike work-hour king Geoff Anders and other polyphasic warriors, I need to sleep around eight hours a night in order to function, although I'll try to only sleep six times instead of seven with 25.14-hour days.

Nick

Hacking on CodeCombat, a multiplayer programming game for learning to code. Mastermind behind Skritter, the most powerful Chinese character learning app.

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