alt Hacker NewsSome of my deepest architectural work honestly happened... in a hammock on the balcony, while alternating between staring at a cloud, the sun, and two magpies building a nest in the birch tree while yelling at me occasionally.
Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later. After years, it is still the backbone of our hosting infrastructure and will go into certification audits later this year.
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Rich Hickey, creator of clojure, literally calls this "Hammock driven development" and has a great talk on the matter (multiple actually):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
(oops, cross-posted with a similar comment.. well, shows the vid is watchworthy)
Rich Hickey gave a great talk on Hammock Driven Development
One of my earlier startups, I was a junior/mid level software engineer. I took a skive day to WFH, but was actually travelling to a gig on the train. I sketched out something to pretend I was working that day, and sent him a photo of it. We ended up shipping that design and I only really made one major mistake that we fixed in v2.
It’s amazing how much value there is in idleness.