Day 173: Crash!

I woke up at 5:30am, and immediately, my mind latched onto figuring out how to implement automatic request rate limiting for Browserflow so that people don’t have to worry about having their IP denied from accidentally scraping sites too quickly.

I tried to ignore it because I knew 3 hours of sleep was not enough, especially after a week of similar sleep deprivation, but after more than 30 minutes of lying there and realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep, I admitted defeat. It’s become a familiar ritual.

But today, it was different. As I worked, I could feel my mind becoming more blurred than usual. Much of getting into flow is being able to hold just the right amount of state so that you’re able to move precisely and fluidly in your tasks, but I found that my capacity to hold information had disappeared. My stack had become reduced to a size a single bit, and any new information purged whatever I had been previously thinking about. It’s that frustrating feeling of knowing that you’d forgotten something, but you can’t figure out what.

Some hours in, I realized that I had spent way too much time working on fixing a bug that I couldn’t properly reason about. I felt myself coding in circles — writing something, deleting it, writing the same exact logic, and remembering again why it wouldn’t work — having a short stack is fatal to context-heavy work. Eventually, I admitted defeat, sauntered back to my bed, and lied down.

I was greeted by a dream in which I was talking to my housemates and collapsed out of exhaustion. I felt myself black out, and even though I recognized at that point that I was dreaming, it felt like I was dying and I was concerned for my real-life health.

When I woke up, about an hour and a half had passed, and I could hear my housemates having their weekly meeting. I tried to fall back asleep but to no avail, so now I’m here writing this post.

Feeling my mental state deteriorate so heavily from sleep deprivation is a great wake-up call (heh, pun definitely intended) to take it easy and give my body time to recover. As much as I want to be coding all day and all night, I’m still made of flesh and bones.

The spirit is willing, but the body is weak. Recovery time!