This is a first for me. I’ve got some personal projects I want to work on, and I really enjoy programming. Normally first thing in the morning I’ll spend an hour waking up, drinking coffee, and writing some code.
I’m a professional software developer, and software development is a passion and hobby. But I felt like I needed a bit of a reset so I’ve made an effort to not write any code at all during the Christmas/New Years holidays (about 3 weeks).
Honestly I don’t feel like I’ve missed out, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting back into it and I think I’ll benefit from it. Ill be back at it again next week.
I know 3 weeks isn’t a huge amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Have you found yourself taking a complete break from coding? How did you find things when you had to start up again? Felt like it benefitted you or ended up losing the trail a bit?
but christmas shift is imho pretty great for new team members (unless it collides with vacation plans, because the job switch was rather sudden and no one else is there), atleast here it tends to slow going, not many meetings and we get to do stuff that accumulated over the year that we wanted to do, but couldn’t for various reasons, so there are enough tasks for which you’ll see a lot of the code base and colleagues actually have time for pair programming and such.
and christmas itself is 2 and a half holidays in germany, so that helps too.
You have a point, but in my experience most of your colleagues are out so if you have questions it is harder to find someone who can help.
yep, a team with “enough” workers when everybody is there and not sick is understaffed, working in those teams can become a nightmare the whole year round.
and for questions the colleague does not know the answere to? we are atleast two people with a functioning brain, we can figure stuff out. Most of the time if a new dev asks me something and i have time, i’ll comb through docs with them or we debug something together even if i am pretty sure what’s to do, because i don’t want to become a search engine for my colleagues, i want colleagues who can figure stuff out, so i’ll show them how I figure stuff out, and I learn stuff along the way pretty often doing that.
if I don’t have time I probably have some links that should lead to answeres and often enough a time window later in the day where we can talk, just because its christmas time and most of my meetings are cancelled :D