It is weekend, Saturday night. You just got home from a dinner party. What do you do? Sleep? No, a computer scientist starts programming…

There is something special about midnight programming. Everything is dark outside, quiet and calm (maybe a small breeze to shake the leaves of the tree a bit — that’s perfect). Everyone is sleeping and the surroundings seem to crawl closer and closer, trying to enforce the sleep. But one table lamp is lit, the cooling fan of the open laptop is making its characteristic, monotonic noise (sometimes changed when computation gets heavy) and the sounds of frequent tabs on the keyboard do not seem to break the silence. I love this…

But why is this different from everyone else having an all-nighter because of late-begun-with assignments? Well, first it is important to point out, that night programming the day before a delivery is usually very unsatisfying. The code style is getting worse and worse as the hours pass and the frustration about not reaching goals is killing involvement in the project. Programming is not just “write some crap and make it fill two pages”. One seldom knows when the goal will be reached.

But when programming a few days in advance, midnight programming has a special feel about it that is difficult to explain.

The contrast was very apparent this last week because I had to deliver an assignment today (as I have written about earlier). Saturday, I was programming until 5 AM in the morning having made a final satisfying touch to my program and being happy about that. Sunday evening, though, was not fun at all. I mostly had to do written work but also some programming and I got to bed at 7 AM this morning and had classes at 9 AM. This resulted in a deadlock of my body software (the brain) and I got stuck in the dreamworld for too long, overslept and missed my first class. Very stupid!

In other news, I had a lecture last Friday given by Vint Cerf, who is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He talked about the future of Internet and networking and seemed very humourous and intelligent. He was actually the guy that co-invented the Internet Protocol which is a major deal.