Longest stretch of coding without little to no sleep

Ouch... We worked 16 hour days for a couple weeks at some points of the year, but that was it.

Also, coding in the wee hours considered harmful.

Coding at 10 AM (after coffee kicks in)

Code:

strncpy(dest, src, sizeof(dest)); // Happy days

Coding at 4 AM (kill me now)

Code:

strncpy(dest, src, sizeof(src)); // You just got owned by the Russians.

 

Most of my work is in IT, don't do much programming anymore.

A couple of years ago we had a major production outage on 2 sequential Saturdays. First one I put in 18 hours on, on the second 20. That was just brutal. The up side is that I was a contactor and got time and a half. I made a weeks pay in just those 2 days.

I've had many long days and worked many crit sits in my career. However those 2 were by far the worst.

I used to do a lot of overtime when I was younger. I don't anymore. Unless there is a production issue, it waits till the next day. Otherwise you just burn yourself out, and you just become less productive.

 

I understand what you're talking about with respect to pressure. I work for a revenue agency, and we have deadlines for when we have to open filing for individual income tax, for example. Sometimes, we also get issues with our direct deposit, and that requires programmer intervention to get the refund to go out correctly. Those have to be handled same day. But we always follow the same process: we do the data fix in the test environment on the same customer, make the auditors verify it, and then do it in production. Even same day. The business users hate it, but they get no choice. Tax data is too critical for us to ever be doing stuff directly in production. (I only see two to three of these scenarios a year.)

 

Still don't have much professional experience, so the longest coding stretch I've been on must have the global game jam last year Was awesome tho

 

Thankfully i'm still in college so i'm not employed my any firm at the moment. However, my senior year of high school we had to do a "senior project" it could be on whatever you want but it was supposed to take a year to complete between research, getting feedback, etc. Our project was due the Monday that we got back from Spring break and I hadn't coded a thing. That Friday I woke up at six and coded until midnight and then repeated that on Saturday and Sunday. To me that is little sleep as I required at least 8 hours of sleep in High School. After coding for roughly 50 hours over the course of 3 days, I realized I hated it so much that I refuse to do that again. Made me wonder if I really would be able to code as a job while maintaining sanity.

 

As a kid in high school my experience's with coding long hours are limited but looking back at my code it seems like I am brilliant at around 11:30 at night then I just become retarded. My "brilliant" code works wonderfully until I have to change one thing and realize I went 50 lines without a singal comment and the function I just wrote handles most of the logic for the entire program is is dealing with list of list. Guess there is always more to learn lol.

 

Lets see...i've gone 48 hours without sleep for coding.....followed by another 24 hours of straight sleep.