A sustained 100 lines/hour is insanely fast to me. Is that a common speed? I doub't i'd be able to cook up something on the same caliber of M2 in a mere 66 hours. Moreover, after 9-5 I usually feel completely beat (I fall asleep standing, in the train).
While M2 is arguably simple, in terms of coding, I'm still amazed at how quickly he had everything from brain dump to production. I had a seed idea which required me to think and rethink, read and reread, draw and redraw. And this whole process took a matter of months.
Is this speed within the norm though, considering you have a decent knowledge of the language you use? Does this time include rereading your code and rewriting for optimization?
Sustained 100 lines/hour is fast for me too. Burst speeds of 100 lines/hour over an hour or two are entirely reasonable. That's less than 2 lines/minute - if I'm coding as fast as I type I can usually do 7-8 lines/minute, so it's ample padding for debugging, optimization, design work, etc.
The conditions for burst productivity ("flow", in the psychological literature) are:
1. Well-defined, achievable goals
2. Automatic knowledge of your toolset - you don't have to look things up about your platform.
3. Fresh & well-rested
4. No interruptions
His article explicitly addresses 1, 2, & 4, and I suspect he arranged his time so 3 was satisfied too. He knew what he wanted from his site, and ruthlessly trimmed it so he only needed to implement features directly relating to the core goal. It was his 5th Cake PHP app, so he knew his toolset in and out. The 66.5 hours were not all spent in a row, and he had no interruptions or overhead while working on it.
These conditions also held in my Scrutiny example (done over Thanksgiving break my senior year of college, with some cleanup over winter break) and Bootstrapacitor (done over 2 weeks + 1 week of cleanup, finished about a week ago). They did not hold for FictionAlley (my first PHP webapp) or my startup (my first Python webapp, and we also don't really fully understand the problem yet), and those two projects take significantly longer.
While M2 is arguably simple, in terms of coding, I'm still amazed at how quickly he had everything from brain dump to production. I had a seed idea which required me to think and rethink, read and reread, draw and redraw. And this whole process took a matter of months.
Is this speed within the norm though, considering you have a decent knowledge of the language you use? Does this time include rereading your code and rewriting for optimization?