miniblog.

Programming languages aren't sports teams: you don't have to choose one to root for! They're more like music genres, you can enjoy more than one. I avoid language stickers for this reason. I don't want my identity to be "I'm an X programmer".

Compile times of 30-60 seconds are particularly challenging: they're too short to do something else, but too long to get into a flow state. I find music helps avoid context switching at least.

I really like instruction counts for measuring performance. It's not perfect, but it's a very stable metric, even if I'm listening to music whilst developing and benchmarking.