HN Explorer

Poll: How does alcohol/smoking affect your thinking?

2 points by pavelkaroukin ↗ HN
I never really was into drinking/smoking. But two days ago I smoked full cigarillo and drunk 1/2 glass of white wine at my backyard staring at clear sky in the late evening.

After getting back to my laptop I've found I could concentrate on particular task which is not that complicated, but definitely require quite a lot of concentration (migrate data between old and new app's db with quite different schemas and logic)

I was able to sit at it for a few hours and really did quite a big chunk of work successfully. All of it being a bit tipsy (since I really never drink, even small doses of alcohol/smoke affect me quite a lot)

I am wondering, what is other developers experience is regarding alcohol and smoking?

3 comments

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chrisacky
Drunk Coding is Dangerous. A few weeks ago, I had a few (too many?) glasses of wine. Spent about 6 hours trying to code some recursive function in order to migrate data stored as adjacency list in mysql to nested set.

Literally wasted the entire evening struggling.

Woke up the next day and bashed it out in about 15 minutes.

pavelkaroukin
In my particular case I did not have much of alcohol. Also I was struggling with doing this task being sober for a few evenings. It's not an "asap" and it was always second priority thing.
anigbrowl
Occasional/moderate stimulation of this sort can be a big boost to concentration, just like a change in your daily environment. However, I wouldn't rely on it! Enjoy a drink or a smoke in moderation for pleasure, and if you feel moved to do work (and have a backup...) then great. But if you need to do work and must smoke a cigarette or something to get in the mood, then you are on the way to an unhealthy addiction.