News: 1619591226

Clients have commented on how they find my web apps easy to navigate and use.

That would explain lots.

I (sort of) remember in my youth partaking of 'drunken' coding on many an occasion.

Once in a while I'd get up in the morning, review my code, and realise that I'd never have thought of that way of solving that problem.

But most of the time I'd get up, review my code, and realise what I'd be spending the morning rewriting!

Oh god yeah. The worst part though is when you're sober you can't understand what you wrote and need to get drunk again.

I had a housemate years ago (works for a large accountancy software firm now) that used to get drunk at the same time and we'd go on weird coding marathons.

The idea was we'd set a very simple goal and attempt to come up with the fewest lines of code to achieve that goal. E.g. card shuffling algorithm, list sorting algorithms, vector prediction algorithms etc.

We were truly at our peak. We could chuck out code while hammered that was elegant and efficient. Neither of us are that good anymore.

We came up with algorithms I still don't fully understand.

The card shuffling algos we came up with are like alien technology.

We wrote things almost exclusively in BASIC or C and one of the key rules is that we weren't allowed to use descriptive English readable names anywhere in our code for variables. We weren't allowed to comment our code and we weren't allowed to reuse any code.

If we hit a wall or big that couldn't be fixed within a reasonable amount of time we had to start from scratch observing the rules above.

The purpose was to find different routes to solve a problem. A bit like starting at one end of a forest and trying to sprint through it without stopping. If we had to stop, back to the edge of the forest and another route had to be found but an already beaten path could not be used.

https://xkcd.com/323/

It didn't work then, either. All we wound up with was a bunch of druggies telling everyone how cool their ideas were, with the rest of us shaking our heads and cleaning up the mess.

This is like being very drunk when a university student. You would have what you felt were the most brilliant and profound insights ever, and couldn't understand why other, more sober people couldn't see it when you tried to explain it to them.

When you woke up the next morning, as well as having a headache you would also have the realization that what you thought was brilliant the night before was either completely mundane or complete nonsense.

A former colleague told me this. He was an interesting guy, for sure, and very reliable and sensible nowadays. He took it "way back when", but said that he had flashbacks for quite a while, and the kind and timing of them left something to be desired.

And then there is the categorisation system as of another former colleague: "I'd take it, my brother would take it, my brother does not want to have anything to do with it". I think acid is definitely not cat1.

I have some strange colleagues....

How did "They" find out? Was he being an idiot on SoMe or does HR have a Raman-spectrometer in the lobby or something?

Perhaps when he presented his "brilliant new plan" to the board one of them asked him "WTF? Are you on drugs or something?", to which he answered "why yes I am, how did you guess?"

"picture yourself, in a boat, on a river...."

...after spending the first 30 minutes slowly eating a bowl of Doritos.

But, then his dose is not "micro".

I took a lot of LSD in my youth, I think it was 76 in 1 year when I was 16. Not proud of it but it is what it is. The question is did it change the way I think? I think it did. I'll give an example. Last year I went to B&Q just after lockdown started and it was boiling hot outside and we were queueing in cars for ages. When we got to the front they directed us into bays. The bays were facing the sun. Everyone else parked forward yet I was the only one that parked backwards while I waited for them to bring to stuff to the car. This also translates into tech. There have been many times I've hit a problem only to come up with some really novel way of getting round it. I can't actually remember a time when I've had to do something with data in particular that I didn't get it done in the end. I was also the person in meetings that thought of something no one else did when working on projects. I don't advocate the use of LSD at all but I do think it has it's merits and probably needs some proper research.

You just don't know, that might be your personality to begin with, it might give you a bit of perspective on things for a few months but unless you get lasting PTSD I don't see how it can affect your life going forward.

Don't forget it was your choice to try it so you were already the kind of person that has a slightly different way of thinking compared to the majority.

Not a drug user and never (willingly) have been, but still smart or experienced enough to park facing away from the sun. I do have some alienation issues where I believe the vast majority of people are not as intelligent as me, reinforced almost every time I see a switched on TV, doesnt matter what content its showing..

You may have sharper wit and deeper insights than most of your colleagues, but would they be even more profound if you hadnt killed those braincells back in the day....

Dummy, should have kept it to himself!

"Startup" founded 8 years ago and still on backing from venture capital? No wonder, if its CEO flies with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

"Alcohol-fuelled Danish film directed by Thomas Vinterberg takes the top prize for non-English language film at the Academy Awards"

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/apr/26/another-round-starring-mads-mikkelsen-wins-best-international-feature-oscar

(Too obvious an icon, sorry...)

They've just moved on to the next one.

* programmer joke

CEO++;

++CEO;

Pre-increment please. Any fule kno making a copy of your old CEO is inefficient.