How to Program Smarter Without Staying Up Until 4:00am

I just read an interesting article at BusinessInsider.com entitled Why Programmers Work at Night.

The article explains why programmers generally tend to prefer working in the wee hours of the morning.

Programming requires keeping a lot stuffed in your brain at once, and thinking about all of it all at once. This task can often be a tad difficult under normal work/life circumstances.

In short:

This is why programmers are so annoyed when you distract them.

Because of this huge mental investment, we simply can’t start working until we can expect a couple of hours without being distracted. It’s just not worth constructing the whole model in your head and then having it torn down half an hour later.

In fact, talking to a lot of founders you’ll find out they feel like they simply can’t get any work done during the day. The constant barrage of interruptions, important stuff to tend to and emails to answer simply don’t allow it. So they get most of their “work work” done during the night when everyone else is sleeping.

If you have ever programmed anything, you understand the above 3 paragraphs perfectly.

Still, there is a better way…

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Can’t Uninstall a Program in Windows? Now you can!

Every now and then, you’ll probably come across some program on Windows that you simply cannot uninstall from the “Uninstall a Program” page in Control Panel.

Normally, it will give you some kind of error that makes no sense whatsoever.

I recently ran across this very issue when I accidentally installed the wrong WiFi driver package. It was an Intel Pro WiFi driver/software set. Only problem was, the puter didn’t have an Intel WiFi card – oops!

Worse yet, I couldn’t uninstall the software because the uninstaller first looked for the hardware. When it couldn’t find the hardware, it bombed with an error saying (you’ll love this): “Please install hardware first.”

I wish I was kidding.

Then I discovered a really handy tool to make everything all better.

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