> "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?"
Whenever I hear that someone whipped up an impressive piece of code in a weekend or in an hour, I am skeptical.
Time passes quickly when you're doing work that you love. Since you're not tracking the time, what seemed like a brilliant 10-minute hack may have taken an hour.
My rule of thumb--based on personal observation--is to multiply by 5 to get a truer estimate of how long an impressive programming project must have taken. And when speaking to a lawyer or bureaucrat, I need to divide by 8.
A project I've been working on recently arrived at a good milestone, so I shelved it for a bit. I was very surprised to see github's 52 week participation graph showing me I had been working on it for 3 months. If someone asked me how long it took me, I very honestly would have said 1 month. Not trying to dupe anyone, not even myself, it just felt that way to me.
Whenever I hear that someone whipped up an impressive piece of code in a weekend or in an hour, I am skeptical.
Time passes quickly when you're doing work that you love. Since you're not tracking the time, what seemed like a brilliant 10-minute hack may have taken an hour.
My rule of thumb--based on personal observation--is to multiply by 5 to get a truer estimate of how long an impressive programming project must have taken. And when speaking to a lawyer or bureaucrat, I need to divide by 8.