Ever felt under pressure from stray semicolons in your sleep, or woken up in a cold sweat with DB queries filling your head? You’ve just had a code dream.
We’re well aware of code dreams as they’re regularly discussed in our classrooms, students and instructors sharing the experiences brought on by countless hours staring at a laptop screen.
We decided to delve into the database dreamscape, sharing memories from CodeClanners that might sound familiar to developers working outside these walls…
Code (and Kate) dreams
“I think it was week four I broached the subject at morning stand-up and I was happy to find I wasn’t alone. Usually I just spout random terms in the middle of the night, but occasionally mine consist of making a really cool function. Then I wake up to find I haven’t. That said, I have also woken up crushed once or twice by my sudden lack of an upcoming date with Kate Beckinsale.” — Steve
Working through problems
“My code dreams are usually pretty mundane — just me trying to work out one little problem for hours on end, leaving me to wake up frustrated that I didn’t fix it! I do usually get code dreams when I’m in the middle of learning something new, so I suppose they’re a signal that I’m pushing myself forwards. Shame I can’t have some cool Matrix style dreams though.” — Bethany
Telekinetic tasks
“It’s been a while since I had any code dreams, but they were a regular occurrence while I was going through the course. They were odd, I’d see screens of code appearing in front of me and I’d have to alter the code using some kind of telekinesis (no keyboard involved) to accomplish some kind of task. On more than one occasion I woke up thinking about semicolons.” — Donald
Running into trouble
“Probably most memorable was from a few years back when I was developing a website for a running store and I had to design a way to store all of the product data from trainers to sportswear and nutrition bars. I remember the visions of going round the store and having to scan in all of the products and then write the DB queries to be able to retrieve the correct details to show the product and price on the website. This was before I knew anything about API’s — having an API in place would have made things a little easier…” — Marc
Never-ending nightmare
“I remember working on one of my projects, where everything was straightforward, writing the code was relaxed and calm. A few days before the deadline I encountered a ‘small’ obstacle. Didn’t seem like the most complex issue in the world, but I couldn’t find a solution for it in a few hours. The small issue became a two-day long nightmare for me and I was trying to find a solution so hard that for the next two nights I kept dreaming about happily explaining the solution to my colleagues, but I didn’t hear what I was saying, nor was I able to look at the code itself.
“Finally during the last night, I actually heard myself in my dream explaining the problem and how I found a way around it. I immediately woke up at 2am, and frantically started typing at my keyboard, and when finally it worked, I think my celebratory shout was heard miles away — to my flatmate’s great annoyance.” — Zsolt
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This article first appeared on the CodeClan blog.
