Your Contribution Graph Means Absolutely Nothing
For the past few months I haven’t been as active on GitHub as I usually am. Why? I’m not sure. There certainly wasn’t any shortage of things for me to work on and I did work on them every so often.
I could blame the college classes I was taking. Starting in March the classes started to pick up in difficulty, and I needed to spend more time working on homework and studying. But finals week was two weeks ago. Why haven’t I resumed the previous level of programming as before?
The honest answer is that I am exhausted. Programming takes a lot of brainpower, not only because I have to come up with some sort of algorithm that might solve the problem (that I made for myself in most cases), but I also have to figure out how to express it in explicit detail to a computer. While a human might innately understand and apply some optimizations to an algorithm – such as making a collection of items only contain each unique value once (a set) and skip an iteration if it’s already in the set – computers make no assumptions about anything. They don’t optimize the container type from a list to a set unless you tell them to use a set, and they can’t tell if an item is unique unless you tell them how to compare items.
Combine that with the fact that I am human and am prone to making the stupidest mistakes ever known to man and then completely overlooking them when debugging, and you get mental burnout in a hurry. I have tried to give my brain a rest from one project by switching to another, but that hasn’t really helped much. That’s basically multitasking, and as any good productivity coach will tell you, constantly switching back and forth between two similar things still wastes time as your brain has to reload its train of thought more than it really needs to.
So I will probably not be spending hours every day working on my programming projects. They will be touched, but I can’t promise that they are going to be completed anytime soon. The game I’ve been working on, Debugger, has been put on indefinite hold. If you saw the teaser video I put out last year that said “Coming soon!” – sorry.
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