Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Multitasking Programming Projects

I've come to the conclusion that is bad for programming to concentrate on more than one programming project at a time.

My situation is as follows:- I write ASP pages for the education industry as my full-time job, and then spend my spare time (what little I have, natch) writing 3D multiplayer strategy games in Java at home; two completely different aspects of programming. I find I can cope with one, because my subconcious (which seems to do a lot of my thinking for me) is quite happy mulling over problems when I'm asleep, or generally just not thinking about them. But it can't seem to handle two, so it means I've got to take over and do the thinking manually. And I'm not just talking about the big problems (my subconcious does have limits after all). I'm talking about every little thing. I find myself adding semi-colons to the end of lines of ASP code. I make mistakes in Java. It seems that cos I'm having to remind myself (and failing) of so many things that I would do automatically otherwise, I'm making so many mistakes. Is it just me?

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