I’m a morning person. 8am is late to me. I’m also a late-evening person. I sometimes work from 8am to 10pm (with breaks for eating). I’ve learned time and time again that programming late-day, or whenever you’re tired, is truly a waste. I spent 7 hours late yesterday trying to perfect ReportFormatter–a rolled-my-own Perl module for generating columnized reports of insanely variable-width data. I was close, but whenever I’d fix X, Y would break, and vice-versa. I forced myself to quit, go home, eat, drink, sleep and in 3 hours this morning I redesigned the module and it works. The design and code is also nicer, unlike the hackish code I was desperately trying to munge into working order yesterday. All that wasted effort for,

Variable                  ...figs/mysqldhelp001.txt ...figs/mysqldhelp002.txt
========================= ========================= =========================
character_sets_dir        /home/daniel/mysql_bin... /usr/share/mysql/chars...
pid_file                  /tmp/12345/data/mysql_... /mnt/data/mysql/sl1.pid
ssl_key                                             /opt/mysql.pdns/.cert/...
report_host               127.0.0.1
log_bin                   mysql-bin                 sl1-bin
innodb_file_per_table     FALSE                     TRUE
datadir                   /tmp/12345/data/          /mnt/data/mysql/

That looks simple, but so do many things which are complex under the hood. It’s amazing how simple it is to do in ones mind. Perhaps that’s why coding such a thing is difficult when one’s mind is fatigued, when the idea-code translations come out as logical as dreams.

Tags: fatigue, wasted effort | Category lesson