How Many Hours Can You Code?
How many hours a day can you write code, and at what point does the quality of your work go down? Even more important is how many weeks and months of that max effort you can still be effective.
In my life, there have only been three periods where I worked crazy hours, and only two of those were multiple months. Generally, over my forty years, I worked a reasonably regular schedule. The standard forty hours a week rarely involve only writing code; you are always doing other things, such as meetings, talking with people, reading or writing documentation, emails, or, more recently, Slack messages and the like, or even reviewing code (which is like coding).
This post documents my first experience working long hours of coding. It lasted only a week and culminated in working about 30 hours in a row (followed by sleeping for two days). I was 26.
In 1985, I conceived the idea that became Trapeze, the first real alternative to row-and-column addressing in spreadsheets, which was first created with Visicalc. Trapeze used formulas referencing blocks of data by name, an odd hybrid of APL, spreadsheets, and ideas you see today in frameworks like Pandas. I got investments from various people, assembled a team, and started building the product. We were still working on it a year later, hoping to ship it at the December 1987 MacWorld in San Francisco. In August of 1986, we all went to the Boston MacWorld.
