A question to Cocoa developers, seasoned and un-:
When the worries of making connections in IB get you down… when something ‘just doesn’t work’, when your code randomly breaks… What do you do? Where do you turn to get away from it all, or to let your subconscious mind work on the problem? This is a little-mentioned programming practice, but one I feel to be quite important.
It’s well-known that getting frustrated working on a project will get one nowhere, and fast. Likewise, dealing with IB’s inconsistencies and vagaries, or mass-grepping hundreds of megs of html for even a hint, causes “How do I do this? This is stupid, I’m missing something simple” messages to build on top of, stick to, and clog your brain’s version of apple-gcc. Soon, you start getting null-pointer errors, too, and things that you KNEW yesterday, or at least knew where to find, are suddenly gone- ideas you had grasped suddenly turn out to be chaotic and strange. Then, you crash. It’s a shame that humans haven’t got protected memory…
Personally, if I’m stumped, I compose a message to cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com, and in the typing I can sometimes think of solutions- at other times, it’s good just to forget about it and listen to some music, take a walk, have a snack. It’s also nice to watch a good anime series like DiGi Charat.
Then again, one could always just write up something at CocoaDev.
Any responses would be appreciated.
happy coding, or good luck cleaning out your head- either way.
–JoeOsborn
Command-tabbing the brain. Go and do something else - you’ll get an NSNotification when it finally clicks.
(Very nice, that comment there made me smile. ^_^ who was it?)
Me
I often find that after searching for answers and trying everything I can think of, I finally give up and compose a message to the CocoaDevMailingList. By the time I’ve finished typing the message the answer is obvious. Either that or I do something else for a while (reading, eating, browsing the web, coding some other project) and let the problem solve itself in a background thread. Then, as the person claiming to be Me took the credit for saying, I get an NSNotification and stop what I’m doing to test the idea on a less flawed compiler. My best advice for KeepingYourSanity though is that if you have to spend your days coding for a lesser OS, make sure you do some Cocoa in your lunch hour. If you don’t have to spend your days coding for a lesser OS, make sure you never have to. Then you will have no real threats to your sanity. – AngelaBrett
I just accept that I’m a little less sane after each session. After all, there’s always the old Pargon Narokath Pargon Santek Xel’lotath Pargon. – ThomasCastiglione
I help my friends with their math homework, personally. A bit harder on the stomach lining, but quite enjoyable otherwise. – RobRix
It seem’s some of the more sucessful folks who develop cocoa work for UnSanity, perhap’s keeping it is not in the best intrest.