Programmers are at their best when they can focus deeply on a task. Managers thrive when they have the energy to context switch. A good sleep and an efficient morning routine help a lot in both cases.

Andrew Huberman is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In this chat with Jocko Willink, Huberman discusses what happens in your body when you sleep and wake, and talks about practices that can help set you up for a day of good work.

Among Huberman’s tips:

• Aim to have a good sleep 80% of the time
• Get natural light in your eyes within an hour of waking up
• Excercise early
• Try cold water to raise your body temperature
• Delay your intake of caffeine by 90 minutes

Simon Willison’s recommended engineering practices are rock solid:

• Documentation in the same repo as the code
• Mechanisms for creating test data
• Rock solid database migrations
• Templates for new projects and components
• Automated code formatting
• Tested, automated process for new development environments
• Automated preview environments

Also from Simon Willison: Documentation Unit Tests (or Test-Driven Documentation)

Keeping documentation synchronized with an evolving codebase is difficult. Without extreme discipline, it’s easy for documentation to get out-of-date as new features are added.
One thing that can help is keeping the documentation for a project in the same repository as the code itself. This allows you to construct the ideal commit: one that includes the code change, the updated unit tests AND the accompanying documentation all in the same unit of work.
When combined with a code review system (like Phabricator or GitHub pull requests) this pattern lets you enforce documentation updates as part of the review process: if a change doesn’t update the relevant documentation, point that out in your review!

In Aging Programmer, Jorge Manrubia reflects on 15 years of programming and what he has found to be true for himself.

I’ve heard the term gRPC used a lot but didn’t really know what it meant. So I was happy to come across this video discussing how CCP games employed gRPC to add stability and reliability to the server architecture that runs Eve Online. The potted history of Eve Online evolution was nice, too.

Two years ago GitHub archived all the open source repos they host along with copies of StackOverflow and Wikipedia on 188 reels of archival film inside a decommissioned coal mine in the arctic. Last week they talked about the why and how.

Gina Trapani talks about why senior leaders sometimes seem less engaged than you’d expect and presents some tips on how to get your message across to them

Charity Majors’s latest post, The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business), is chock-full of good stuff like this:

Power flows to managers by default, just like water flows downhill. Managers have to actively push back on this tendency by explicitly allocating powers and responsibilities to tech leads and engineers. Don’t hoard information, share context generously, and make sure you know when they would want to tap in to a discussion. Your job is not to “shield” them from the rest of the org; your job is to help them determine where they can add outsize value, and include them. Only if they trust you to loop them in will they feel free to go heads down and focus.

Noclip are a tiny studio who create documentaries about video games. They concentrate on diving deep into the history of studios or the development of specific titles. Entirely funded by Patreon, Noclip’s documentaries are hight quality and fascinating viewing.

In 2018 Noclip published the first episode in a series about the development of Hades, starting just as Supergiant Games were getting ready to put the game into Early Access. The series chronicles the process of developing and iterating a game, responding to and incorporating feedback from eager customers with high expectations, and, as development rolls into 2020, figuring out how to work on a game during a pandemic. The final episode was released in 2021 and documents what happens when the Hades finally reaches 1.0.

If you liked Double Fine Adventure then this documentary will be right up your alley.