Health as a dev

[2025-06-02]

Health is something one usually overlooks at in the early life, with your body being vibrant and able to fight off most of the diseases.But like all things, it catches up to you: the alcohol, the sugar plus the fats

As a dev it is easy to let yourself go. With you sitting all day and being indoors mostly. I think as a person who is in intersection with all these venn points I have discovered a sort of remedy to compensate for my bad Health habits. My goal is to atleast live to see AI take all our jobs.

The junks#

During a debugging session one may want to step away from the code to think out of the box where it went all wrong with the code. This is a very prone period to open a pack of food because well nothing gets you out of a certain thinking state than food. Food is designed to make you calm and relax your mind.

But the cost of this is you relax so much that you do not want to continue with debugging as it is a bore compared to eating. This is a form of escapism.

A remedy to this would be first surrounding yourself with as much health food so that when debugging time befalls, one can simply chow on healthier snack compared to the bad food. Secondly, one can alternate eating with taking walks. Simple movement like a walk around the building has a large impact in the long run though it may seem minimal and non-impactful. The average walking goal can be around 6K steps.

Late nights#

There is a certain type of norm with devs that working on a project at night makes it super big and super important. I blame this on The Social Network movie. The perfect time to sleep is 10pm. People construct an ideology that the more time you work on something the more you build.The issue with this chain of thought is that it factors out working efficiently and at peak performance. In some cases this is true but let me give you a small mind puzzle:

We have two people:Bram and Richard. Bram types 140wpm and Richard around 50wpm. These are their typing speeds on a good day. A good day meaning: enough sleep, not sick and good morning workout. If Richard has a "good day", Bram stayed up all night working on a project and definitely didn't follow his morning routine. Richard will have more impact on their day project compared to Bram.

At first staying up feels like the best move, but it is pseudo-productivity: meaning it seems like you are making an impact, but you are just compensating for lost sleep most of the time.

Fixing a sleep pattern takes about a week if you stick with it. The best going-to-bed time being 2200hrs and waking up at 0500hrs and doing your morning-workout.

Morning workout#

As a person who spend most of their time on a sitted on their computer, it is best to have a morning workout to keep your body active. A morning workout can simply be doing a jog for 1KM or a collection of sit-ups and push-ups. One might choose to go the extra length and join the gym.

Keeping the body active is the goal.

[#health #vim #bram]