Will's blog

Tom Christiansen wrote an article thingy about efficiency of keyboards as an input device and how it sucks. The reason for suckage is that since keyboards differ from each other, and often were designed under premises that functionality and efficiency should take a backseat to making the Enter key bigger and the space bar smaller. It's a good article. Anyhow, it talks about zenning out whilst programming. The layers between your thinking about your code, translating that into design, translating that design into functions and code, translating that into a series of instructions that you send your fingers which then type a bunch of stuff in... All that collapses into your mind and your design.

Frequently in science fiction there will be some dude with a set of vr goggles on and special gloves and they will manipulate virtual objects as if the objects were really in the space in front of the dude. It's kind of cheesy. But that's how zenning out feels. You lose track of your environment and time. Your senses fall asleep as you manipulate this virtual design in your mind of how your program works. As you manipulate it, it grows and reacts. You forget that you're typing on a keyboard. You forget to blink to keep your eyes moist.

I forget to eat and often that my body needs maintenance. This is zenning out. Then suddenly you wake up and your systems come back online and you become aware again of the world around you and your eyes hurt and you're starving and your cup of coffee has been ice cold and half full for hours.

And that is bliss. And it's even cooler when I understand what I've just written and doubly-cooler if it works.