Never tell anybody that you know how to code...

I wanted to work on my sideprojects on the last days of the year but then my wife spawned a childprocess and somehow it eats up all my ressources..

The first time writing code in an airplane was very uncomfortable. Everyone around me thought I was hacking the airliner.

I was writing HTML.

Vacation without code
Like
Food without salt

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

Story #1: So I took a month of parental leave. And was planning to extend it a little longer to deal with my final exams. I was planning to spend lots of quality time with my wife and newborn son. Little did I know... It turns out that out of 5 OoO weeks I was looking forward I actually had 3 at most. The rest I've spent working remotely as I was insisted to deploy a brand new and poorly tested feature to PROD 2 days before my paternity leave. So I spent 2 weeks debugging things in PROD. Remotely. Needless to say that did suck.

Story #2: After story #1 I've learnt my lesson. This summer I took 3 weeks annual leave to renovate my apartment. I asked to not to be disturbed unless there's an emergency. And an emergency it was. One of our app users had a planned hi-load batch job lasting for 2-3 months. Hundreds of thousands of items had to be created and processed. It turns out the _processing_ algo had some flaws and was acting out. I was called out and asked to assist. I knew this sort of debugging is going to take a lot of my time so this time I put my conditions on the table: I will assist but I'll extend my leave by 1.5 the time I spend working now. They took the deal. Instead of 3 weeks I had 5 weeks of vacation!

I don't care that much about my salary. I prefer to exchange it for my time off hence I didn't ask for compensations.

Bottom line: NEVER EVER underestimate or undersell your time and effort. You are a valuable asset and if the team/client needs you on your day off -- make it count. Your time off is YOUR time. Never forget it.

What is "vacation"?

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Went on boat.

Threw up on boat.

The ground is still wobbly.

No code for me.

Created a poll to chose which side project to carry on during holidays, came up with a new one instead.

Story of my life.

Wife and I went to visit her grandparents and when we were at the hotel she would watch lifetime and i would code.

As for Christmas, there's nothing else to do in this town so why not code.

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.

I always try but I'm social as hell and a beer lover so that mostly turns into laptop etc being pushed aside in favor of friends, music and beer. 😅

This blew my mind :O how cool is that !?!

Finals over. Get to enjoy family time.
Gets email from Amazon. We wanna move on with the hiring process. Please complete these online tests. By 12/26.

Good bye family so I can cram haha

Found an old laptop in the apartment I was staying in and wrote a shitty incremental game in HTML and JavaScript with no libraries because there was no interwebs. At least alcohol is mega cheap in eastern Europe.

Yeah, planning to advance through my PhD thesis.

The longest vacation I took in my last job was only for three days. I didn't touch a computer for those three days.

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

I got a last minute request to do an app a day before going to my hometown which is basically a village. Thought I would complete it there using Internet from my mobile Hotspot. Turns out I was not even getting 2g network.

Then I discovered that if I sat at one particular corner of my house I would get 1 bar of some unprotected WiFi of some neighbouring home. Ended up uploading and downloading all changes sitting in an awkward position in some corner for all changes for almost a whole day.

Last summer we went camping but it was raining for 4 days straight. The first and second day we all went to a nearby mall. On the second day I bought a new mobile router with the only carrier that had reception on the camping grounds. The third day I stayed in the tent coding along while the rest went for the mall. In the fourth day I got angry messages in slack telling me to enjoy my vacation instead of working. Fixed a major bug that day the team had trouble with. It was a very nice vacation and on the fifth day the sun came out and never left until the vacation was over.

My lesson learned was: if it's raining, fix the production bug to get sun again

"Story about coding on vacation?"

"Heck" to the "no".

Alexa, define vacation

once upon a time I went on vacation.

It was for 5 days and I went to Leh-Ladakh with my family. (Me, My big bro and my parents.)

It's a beautiful and cold place. Snow and High Mountain and no phone call from anyone.

It was supposed to be no call. But on the 3 days, I got a call from my junior and he said to me that server is not working and it's giving 404 error.

So I told him to go to Cpanel (It was client's server). After 1 hour I got a call back from him and he was not able to fix it.

So I had to open the Cpanel in my Galaxy Note 8, Open file manager, go through all the files and logs and fix it code in 2 or 3 files.

It took 4 hours to fix the problem. But that day I understood the value of my Note 8 and its big screen. Thank you, Samsung.

Note: The lake in the photo is Pangong Lake/

Some years ago I was on vacation with my wife. Everytime we were at the swimming pool, I worked on a really small side project. About 4 months later, I had an interview for my first Job as a developer. I showed them this project and got the job 😁

When I was about 10, I used to read these magazines with code listings for programs, and the only things I really understood were these text adventures that I imagined to be of Zork-like quality (gasp!). In reality, it was more like the choose-your-own adventure books of the time (which were actually pretty cool, and had pretty tight memory management). At one time, on a vacation somewhere in the eighties, I got tired of playing in the river with my friends and instead opted to continue writing lines of BASIC in a little paper notebook, inside my parents' car (at 34 degrees C), trying to perfect a storyline about my little brother and his pet dog he got for his most recent birthday, fighting the cat empire etcetera etcetera. Weird looks, good times.

Hell yea, gotta finish my prep project for my bachelor's thesis so I've been coding every day since the beginning of the holidays.

To be perfectly honest with you I love it! It's like a 9-5 job, no classes at uni, just work and coffee breaks and I even got to go back to my parent's house for two weeks which is wonderful.

I wish that uni could always be like that though, gotta make the most of those two weeks

I don't think you understand the word, "vacation."

No, thank God.

Not exactly vacation, but there was this nice-to-have feature in our application that I coded up in the hospital after my wife gave birth to our son. I wrote it during the downtime while they were both sleeping.

#1 hand in my notice
#2 start my own company
#3 enjoy work
#4 make a metric shit-ton of money (contributes to previous point)

I can't live without coding so I don't take vacations for more than 2 days. However, I code for myself.

Best work I have ever done was done on a beach, in a lounge chair with a beer in my hand and laptop on the lap.

Vacation !? What is that!?

Nope, just nope

I love coding on vacation. We sometimes take long flights like 5hrs an then another 5 hrs. I get so much done in flight without the distraction of phone calls or the internet (YouTube).

Not sure it's so much about my vacation, but my boss' one. I look forward to uninterrupted days in the office where I can work without much small talk or having to explain my logic in great detail to a non-technical boss. So, when I heard he was away for a week, I thought, great, I'll have some time to focus...

Whoah there, not so fast. Turn up at work on Monday morning to find my boss online on Slack waiting to chat with me. He's on the other side of the world. It's the middle of the night for him. And he says I'm not allowed to work remotely...

Learning Ruby on Rails on 2018

Thinking of developing a mod for a game I play, but only thinking about it so far. No coding yet. Probably no coding until I'm back at work on the 26th.

Before my vacation I’d been chatting with one of our dbas about an etl tool we needed for a customer we’d already signed all the contracts with saying we would provide one for a historical database of old data. They had been looking at one from SAP but in typical fashion a license was worth more than the actual contract.

Anyway long story short on the weekend before I went back to work I rattled together a little python proof of concept using a couple of azure databases and when I went back demo’d it to the pm and dba they loved it and we built on the poc to have a working loader which saved us about £30k by not buying the SAP product and just wrote our own.

Too many calls because of unread emails.

But didn't turned on the laptop.

Had fun on beach, enjoyed too much as it was my first marriage anniversary.

No Comments 😭😭😭😭

Well there are Xmas holidays, I’m late with delivery of this project of mine like a month, and here am I trying to put this whole thing together ... but still not in full on coding stage :/

Does it count for wk136?

Vacation ? Bro I have so many things to learn, am not taking any chances. Vacation can wait till next year

Coding during vacations? I'm having a fork in three days. Two processes are already alive. They are more resource hogs than Chrome, they are following each my step like Facebook and are more annoying than windows updates. Home needs defragmentation each few hours, strict antiviral policy is a must, there are random wake ups during the night.
Please, remind me, why do people want to have kids?

Shit. I'm literally absenting university classes to code, never mind vacations...