The Blog

A peek into the thoughts of the man behind Milk Carton Designs

Coder’s Insomnia

Posted: June 13, 2005 @ 03:23 AM EST | Filed Under: Life, Programming

For the sake of adding to my personal list of coding-induced medical disorders, I’d like to talk a little bit about what I like to call Coder’s Insomnia.

Insomnia, as defined at dictionary.com, is the “chronic inability to fall asleep or remain asleep for an adequate length of time.”

Well, I think you can draw your own conclusions about me and this “disorder” considering the time of this post, and the relevance therein. What keeps us designers, developers, scripters, coders, geeks, and what-have-you, up all night is one of a few things:

  1. Caffeine
  2. The need to code, whether to keep deadlines (more often the case), or trying to put into code that idea we’ve had for a while
  3. Fixing a bug (stupid bugs…)
  4. Interrupting our own sleep with the thought of new ideas we either forget by morning or have to hurriedly find paper and pencil and scribble down the idea (I keep paper by my bed =\ )

It’s fun, but it’s tiring. Quite. And it’s happening to us all, I think. Blake Ross has had a post asking what helps others keep themselves awake through the night to complete coding, and more recently about pulling some all-nighters. But more importantly, I myself have fallen prey to this. This isn’t just the caffeine (as some of you know, I’m quite the … lover of it), but … the code. The inability to sleep at night because I’d rather be coding, flinging my creative juices at the screen and putting them online for the world to see. It’s not just code, it’s my … creativity, my contribution to this world, as little or insignificant as that contribution may be, considering the big picture. To me, and to many others, I think that’s worth the sacrifice. Worth pulling all-nighters, filling our bodies with caffeine, smashing our heads on our respective desks. It’s worth it because it’s what we do and who we are and what we live for. And I think, if it gives us this “Coder’s Insomnia” — which it does, no doubt — then so be it, because it’s worth it to say I know I did something with my life.