--- title: "Late In The Evening" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/15/late-in-the-evening.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/15/late-in-the-evening.html" published: "2003-06-15T14:37:00" updated: "2003-06-15T14:37:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "It's all quiet now. Everyone has left work and went home. When all the busy sounds of the day disappear, this is when I feel most comfortable. I find I get the most work done after 5PM. We're at the 11 th floor,…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Late In The Evening By Roy Osherove June 15, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published June 15, 2003; technical details may be outdated. It's all quiet now. Everyone has left work and went home. When all the busy sounds of the day disappear, this is when I feel most comfortable. I find I get the most work done after 5PM. We're at the 11th floor, towering (well, not really "towering", but a "bit higher than" would do) over Tel Aviv's center. During the day this place is one big pile of cars, honks and smog. But now it's late evening hours. If I go up to the window and put half my body out, almost falling, and tilt my head to the left, I can see the sea. The window is not in my room, it far away in the conference room. There's a nice cool breeze in the air when I open that window. It reminds me how much I'm missing being closed up between these walls from morning to night. I can still see plenty of cars zooming by on the road below, but everything seems much more peaceful. Everyone at the bus stations looks tired and weary from the long day. I've been hacking away some code for the last several hours with almost no break, hypnotized by the sounds of my keystrokes, generating invisible logical connections between logical things that did not exist just moments ago. This is the time when imagination turns into reality. When I "_flow_" I feel nothing short of a wizard, waving his shiny keyboard around, making cool stuff happen. When I wake up from these "_flows_" I find that several hours passed by. This is when I open the window and let the cool evening wind caress my face. \- "_You've done well, wizard, but work is abound and we must continue_"  I can almost hear it whisper to me. Well, back to the hot seat. Just me, my keyboard, a 17" screen and the humming of the air conditioning behind me. Soon the AC will stop cooling and will only push semi-cold air onto my back. The building management "saves money" this way. When I turn around I can see a picture of me and my wife hanging on the wall behind me. It's enclosed in a light brown frame.  We took that picture on her birthday, I think it was two years ago. I can look at that picture and get more strength. "_Keep Coding_". I do. Punching away on the keyboard, I sometimes do it like a robot. It took some time for me to start typing fast. Some looong time. Now I can almost type blindly, but not really. I tried learning touch-typing, but couldn’t rid the old typing habits. Sometimes you'll get to some word combinations that you type so often that you can actually type as fast as you think. Things like "if", "then", "Dim I as integer"   zoom by. People at work tell me I hit my keyboard so hard it's going to break someday. It will.  When I hit "Enter" its like a small victory every time. Sometimes' though, I'll get those cryptic error messages and crashes that only a VB6 developer can understand. On those message boxes I'll hit "Enter" almost like I'm trying to hit that message box. I find it almost rewarding. Besides, keyboards are cheap J "_Go home_". Just a little while longer. Just trying to make this one.last.bit.work.and.than.I'm.off.  **F5**. "Error". **Fix**. **F5**. "Error". **Fix** more. "_ugh_". **F5**. It runs. I'm off. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Jun 17, 2003 ### ["How Do I Get There From Here?"](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/17/quothow-do-i-get-there-from-herequot.html) - Jun 16, 2003 ### [My Baby Hits The Road Tomorrow](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/16/my-baby-hits-the-road-tomorrow.html) - Jun 14, 2003 ### [Family Vs. Technology](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/14/family-vs-technology.html) - Jun 13, 2003 ### [Ouch!](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/13/ouch.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/