Not Hotdog

Does anyone have advice if you live in a small living space? I live in a small studio apartment and don't have the luxury of having a separate room (or even a section of the room) that can exist solely as an office. I have problems with distractions when working at home because of this. Going out to work at a cafe or public place is "ok" normally, but kind of defeats the purpose of not coming into contact with a lot of people.

Think of everything posted as possible suggestions. The need to feel a mental separation between work and not-work is real, but what it takes to feel that separation is different for everybody. Try as many of the suggestions as you can, stick with what's practical, effective, and gives you enough of that feeling.

Having work-specific rituals seems to help, like make an effort to do the usual shower and get dressed even though you don't really have to. Maybe listen to a different genre of music, get lunch from a specific place, etc.

Music can be good for mode switching. I prefer electronic music with no vocals.

Also, get dressed.

Disregarding the business impact, I always find it kind of amusing when github goes down. All the developers around me will start to stand up and walk around as if in a collective haze. I work in an area with a large density of tech companies and sidewalk traffic will increase during these outages.

If only we had a distributed system that would let you work off a local server.

The problem is that things like issues and PR comments aren’t distributed. Perhaps they should be, but they aren’t now.

Sure you can do some work locally but if your CI server can't check out the branch to build it and you can't approve pull requests for merge, then its a bit limiting.

Maybe CI shouldn't be farmed out to the cloud.

Even if you run the CI on your own network, if it can't check out from Github it isn't going to have the latest code unless you're hosting your own repos for CI. Developers will need to push their changes to CI Git in addition to Github. Its certainly possible but far outside the practices of what most companies relying on Github are likely to do for the once or twice a year it goes down briefly.

Are people that reliant on GitHub to cause such a thing?

All of my code lives on GitHub, my employer's repos are there, everything... Yet I've never been like "shit, GitHub is down, I can't work anymore"

This is the first time in a while where I actually saw they were down while it happened.

If you push code often and rely on ci and PRs and issues then you are pretty tied. I think a good portion of it is a bit tongue in cheek, but it’s also a good reminder that you can standup and walk around and be alive.