• Good night’s sleep (8-9 hours)
• Clearly defined requirements.
• A fun challenge to solve.
• An idea of how to begin.
• Music! Something fast paced and/or harsh. I find soft tunes, good lyrics, etc. are usually very distracting.
• Deadlines help, too, even if they make me stressed out and work too much.
• No political BS / hateful and intolerant political comments from my coworkers within the past day or two, as being called a horrible, racist nazi by association absolutely kills my desire to do any work for them. Going two days without something like this happening is exceedingly rare.
• Being left alone, *especially* in the morning before work! The more distractions, the harder it is focus, even if i have peace and quiet later on.

CEO and board members are in town for a meeting and getting shown around. They get to our area chatting loudly and CEO go "shhhh... Be quiet"

(Looney tunes voice)
Me: "we're hunting wabbits!"

Cleaning lady: *wants some tunes during work*
Me: "Sure, I wanted to listen to some music as well.. not sure if our genres match though 🤔"
Cleaning lady (CL): "So what kind of music do you listen to?"
Me: "Synthwave"
CL: "So um.. synthesizers?"
Me: "Well yes, but it kind of ties in with the dark side of technology.. the whole 1984 dystopian future etc. Privacy, lack of user freedom, etc."
CL: "So essentially cult music?"

TIL that the tech community is a cult for listening to synthwave. I bet she believes that tech peeps are lizards too.
*mentally slaps cleaning lady* - User!!

OK I'm going write some serious heaps of code, my commits will fucking ddos the repository!

All I need is some tunes to drown out the office noise. Hey this song is quite good. Haha Google suggests my favorite song from 2 years ago, let's give that a try next. Oh I didn't know there was a new album out... hmm but I don't like everything... lets find out which 2 songs are good enough to add to a playlist by skipping aimlessly through it. Come to think of it, this style is not really that great for coding, maybe something with less vocals. Oh I know, I'll see if I can find some postmetal goa triphop electroswing dubpsy remix of that on YouTube, that would be enjoyable. No... I like the original better, although I'm a bit bored with it, maybe there's a similar artist hiding in a corner on Bandcamp, or Soundcloud... hey that's a cool mix, I wonder where that sample is from, lets try to find it...

Saw some cheapie little radio in the dollar store, bought 2 of them for reverse engineering. Powered it from my lab bench power supply as usual, and tested whether it actually works before doing anything else.. then I noticed that the tunes were actually quite catchy, so I just ended up listening.

Then I started to notice that the audio wire I was using (the one I've spent a couple of days building earlier) had intermittent audio issues where the right driver would drop out when the wire was held in certain positions. Oscilloscope probing showed that there was some sort of disconnect, with only the 50Hz noise from the power lines showing up. Opened up the connector and noticed that the ground wire had detached. An 28AWG electrical wire that was inside a jack that was meant for stress relief! Yet the copper strands must've detached one by one regardless. What do I need then, huh?! 18AWG which wouldn't even fit on the connector, only to see the strands in that eventually detach as well?! You know what, let's go fancy.. 1AWG which is meant for extremely high current applications!!

At that point I was literally shouting "FUCK!!! Why does this shit always happen to me?!! ONE FUCKING PROJECT THAT FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY, YET STILL BROKE?!!!! WHY!!!!!!"

Clearly I need some fresh air to cool down. On my way to the fast food restaurant to get some Bicky burgers. More shit, humans. One stupid driver who slowed down on me, which of all things I hate the most. GO FASTER ALREADY YOU SLOWFUCK, AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!!! Next a pedestrian with a dog.. I swear motherfucker, if that dog comes anywhere near me I'll personally turn it into fucking fricassee.

Ah and then comes the killer.. in this stupid fucking summer, all that's needed to fix any issue is a fucking stupid DESPACITO, right?! More like DeSPASTICo!! FUCK!!!!

.. Back home, rather tired. So essentially a wire that was specifically built to have high endurance broke on me. Back to Bluetooth I guess.

Avicii died. 😞😢
At just 28.

He got me through some tough and grueling times. I still use his tunes while coding. I'm still shocked that he left so early. But he made it count. He might've lived short but he lived large.
I'll miss him. I'm sad that he left so early. But his work will live on. I hope to become as good at programming computers as he was at using them to make music. His music was perfection. RIP.

I kind of feel like I invested 2.5 years of my life trying to run away from being a hamster, and here I am in my PhD back in the hamster spot.
The moment I finish compiling some not-os-compatible package, I get a new one to tame. A day after perfecting a sensor integration, another sensor is thrown at me. I am the one who calibrate and tunes the MoCap system, including manufacturing the markers and ordering part. I make sure the robot is functional, from software to battery replacement.
I need to crawl on floors to collect data, while the rest of the lab uses public datasets.
I optimize C++ code, and then get asked to write unit tests and use a CI, while the rest of the lab just writes some subpar Python.
They are doing research and I am doing Cinderella work.
I shouldn't be punished because I get shit done, whether it 3D modeling, CMake voodoo or low-level programming.
Instead of encouraging other lab mates to develop skills, everything is thrown at me. Fuck that shit.

Might be a loose interpretation of 'vacation', but I was running a marathon using my phone for tunes, when suddenly I got a call from my boss; our application server had died and he had no idea how to restart it. So while running the race I was timing my exhales to give him the step-by-step instructions for reset-to-restart. The good news is that the miles just flew by as he read the logs, and I responded with commands. Suddenly I was at mile 22 and was actually feeling pretty good; didn't finish the race with a PR but was happy with the result and did get the server back up.

Tunes throughout the work day...

Someone's interrupting:
Queen, Don't Stop Me Now

Working on same bug for hours:
Muse, Supermassive Black Hole

Merge Conflicts:
Jay Z, 99 problems

In the zone coding:
xzibit, Concentrate

All bugs squashed, deployed, going home:
Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World

*coding, furiously, to sweet tunes*

*awesome new song comes on I haven't heard before*

*30 seconds in, saves to playlist*

*Song continues playing*

*....Removes from playlist*

Just discovered a band named Master Boot Record. All of their albums are execution files. It's kind of metal meets chip tunes actually pretty good, if you're into that kind of thing.

ok, so i remake music and make sprites sheets for smaller developers, in an attempt to make them more recognizable. the devs normally give me a place in the "special thanks" section of the credits, and then i got people spam messaging me asking me to make them a game or something, so i explain to them i dont make games, just assets. however no matter how many times i tell certain people, they still keep on asking me to make a game when all i do is remake music and do a bit of pixel art, so the conversation usually goes a bit like this -

Them: Hi! I was wondering if you could make me a game?

Me: I don't actually MAKE games, just things you can use in your game.

Them: So can you make me a game?

Me: I don't know a single bit of programming, i just like to remake stuff.

Them: YOUR A FAKER???

Me: No-

Them: YOU SAID YOU CAN MAKE ME A GAME!

Me: i never said that, and i DON'T make GAMES,
JUST ASSETS.

Them: i'm blocking you

Me: why tho

Them: blocked :)

Me: [content hidden]

___________________________________________________
so yeah. this is why i stopped making assets for games and just remixed tunes for personal use.

If the whole office has to listen to "gon put on mah iron shirt and chase the devil out dis earth" on max volume in between pandora commercial one more day, I'm going to hack the sound system and play Norwegian death metal. Jah!

To my colleague on the desk beside: Please don't code Javascript so close to me. Keep some safe distance. XD

Putting on tunes before getting to work

Hey devrant, what do y'all listen to when you're working? What gets you in the zone?

Personally, I listen to a lot of chiptunes, some Opeth, Black metal, 70's, and lately, a lot of Mega Drive. Awesome stuff, but it's admittedly a weird mix. Always looking to find new stuff to listen to.

So this week I picked up some Sennheiser HD 600 phones for my listening pleasure and take my mind off life stresses.

At work I've been using some Bose phones, but these Senns being open back may be a little loud for the neighboring cubicles.

I guess sound quality and all day use are mutually exclusive. Anyways, what's coding without some great indie tunes. :)

BTW, they sound amazing!!

TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.

Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.

Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.

My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.

Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.

I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.

Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.

I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers.

*starts work day*

"Let me put some music on so I can hum tunes while I code"

*10 mins into working*

"Oh wait, I gotta focus here"

*Turns music off*

Result: Music stays off the entire day.

What are the different ways by which an Android can play an audio?
I was recently doing a research on Android audio. And i wanted to know which libraries are responsible for audio/video play.

As far as i know media player and exo player are the two libraries which can be used to play user variety of audio/video files, application's raw/asset files and online stream files. Are there any other sounds beside system sounds which i forgot or other libraries which are also used for media playing?

And also what about these system files? Can we access system ringtones and notifications/ alarm tunes in a normal, non-rooted phone? I remember that my previous phone's music player (android kitkat maybe) was able to pick some system ringtones. Is it still possible now(android lollipop nd above) ?

Although i guess music in Android assets or raw files of some other app won't be accessable to my app, unless i am having screen record permissions?

So, the past 2 months I get random freezes on my OS(Ubuntu 18.04). ONLY the mouse is working, nothing else but REISUB.

This happens sporadically, but seemingly ONLY WHEN I'M 30-80% DONE AND MY "ADD" HAS ME WORKING ON 4 DIFFERENT THINGS AT ONCE.

Disabling docker hasn't helped.. Ensuring using less than 50% RAM doesn't help. Changing browsers, cleaning my VSCode extensions, shifting to XMonad(lightweight DE) from gnome(which almost worked for almost a couple of days), changing graphics drivers, downgrading kernel AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE.. DOES. NOT. WORK.

AAARGH MY MOTHERFUCKING 7 YEAR OLD LAPTOP WITH SSD IS PROBABLY SINGING ITS LAST TUNES. TODAY IS THE LAST TIME I'LL LET FREEZES HAPPEN.. I'M RUNNING MEMTEST86 AND WILL COPY ALL MY LATEST LOGS AND LEARN A BUNCH OF STUFF I'LL NEVER WANT TO TOUCH AGAIN. I HAVE TO SPEND SUPER VALUABLE TIME TO MAKE SURGERY ON THE MIRACLE THAT IS MY ANCIENT LAPTOP. I'M SO AFRAID THAT IT FALLS APART WHEN OPENING IT.. THE PLSTIC FOR THE COOLER IS BROKEN AND THE SHIT HASENT HAD THE BEST LIVING CONDITIONS (SOME TIMES -5c OTHER 40+)

I'm aware that I should go to the forums, which is my next move. But reading on there, it could be a graphics drive or, kernel problem, a faulty harddisk or RAM problems. It also goes without saying that I'm backing up for the 14th time the past month.

My thing is, that I have dual boot and running Windows for 14 hours straight with loads of loads, while really getting punished, renders a completely functional computer...

As so many have said it's gotta be music. Coding and music just seem to gel so well together. Just feel I'm super productive when the tunes are blasting out.

"Like ... phenomena united by Einstein's formula E = mc², procedure and data are to some extent two different ways of viewing the same thing."

Utility libraries, because I actually get to see my life improve because I have them. Creating new projects becomes easier because I put parts I reuse somewhere else.

There was an old config file generator/manager I kept using for a while, some string conversion libraries between formats, some REST/WebRTC API wrappers, I have a web audio API I create tunes with in various projects. CI/CD scripts for laziness so I never have to know how to set anything up again. Lately the thing I'm most happy about is I turned some free text saving service into a makeshift database and it's been working well for about half a dozen projects now. Wouldn't handle large amount of users but can't beat free and easy.

I also find merit in prototypes/old projects, because I can reference random things I did in them in newer unrelated projects. Things too small to warrant their own utility library, argh!

"The operating system and kernel in Ubuntu Core are also delivered as snaps, so the entire platform is transactionally upgradeable."

Making an entirely instrumental playlist has increased my productivity and consentration more than I ever thought possible.

Thanks wolfgang for making some sweet tunes!

Watching programmers that don't design first:

"users must stitch together disparate systems, and some applications simply cannot be expressed efficiently in any engine."

!rant

I can't work without good tunes on.
What do you put on when you need to really get in the zone?
Any good Spotify playlists out there?