Ask HN: Do you smoke cannabis while programming?
15 comments
Yes. It’s replaced coffee and cigarettes for me. It instantly quiets all negative emotions I’m feeling (mostly boredom and frustration) so I can focus on the code. I’m lucky to live in a legal state.
Were you able to stop smoking cigarettes?
I've found myself in a situation now where I am almost unable to code without being stoned. When I began smoking, I got over more than a decade's of insecurity over being a sysdadmin who couldn't "really code". Now it's sort of intertwined. Without being stoned, I just stare at my screen then switch to a news site after a few minutes, then repeat.
Only when I already know pretty well what to do - write something simple but lots of it. Not when I actually need to reason about something - because your memory is low it’s pretty hard to do.
Seems like a good way to open myself up to the nightmarish thought avenues of the inherent existential dread involved in debugging endlessly complex garbage code bases.
For work, no. For educational or personal purposes, yes, sometimes.
4-aco-dmt is nicer for that kind of thing
You joke, but I actually prototyped a bgp-friendly api & bgp-driven authoritative DNS service for edge-computing over a weekend while on a cocktail of Mushrooms, MDMA and an incredible amount of bubble-hash. Ultimately I formed a small company around it and sold it 6 months later to a hosting company for $75k. I was stoned for 90% of the development work, and was also coming down off of an MDMA trip when I pitched the idea. I literally walked into a hosting company owned by a friend at random (after not seeing him for 3 years) and told him I'd built this thing and that he needed it for their cloud offering.
I did once. Not a good result.
Of course, I also drink a lot of alcohol before deploying to production and get a lot of sugar when code reviewing.
Do you calculate your Ballmer Peak?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ballmer%20Pe...
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ballmer%20Pe...
It's about 0% for me.
No, we don't. In CyberCraft (software development company from Ukraine) we have found out more efficient ways to stay relaxed. We practice different kinds of sport together, try yoga and meditations. Such an approach helps to get rid of anxiety, stay motivated and control the mind.