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Comment by Benferhat | Hacker News Reader

I'd say you should go based on hours or TODO entries per day.

Thanks for the input. I like this idea, but it's hard to measure output. For example, if I put aside an hour a day, some of the time I will be thinking about code, maybe design, but what would be a good measure of how much code I write? LOC, characters, functions... And would it vary depending on language?

Writers can just sit down and write whatever pops into their heads. Programming doesn't work that way. You have to think things through, look at them from different altitudes, all the way from a bird's eye view of the entire project, down to what's going on in this particular function. You might also have to spend a ton of time debugging. These things are too nebulous to measure quantitatively, so you have to measure them qualitatively.

I don't think it should be any different for coding. I probably wasn't too clear in my question. I spend a lot of time designing and putting together systems, but I just don't write code any more. As in actually opening up an editor and just plain writing code. Like a writer, shouldn't I be able to code whatever pops into my head too? For example, sit down and write a small program that will maybe take a bunch of employee schedules (in xml) and find openings and or conflicts in the schedules.

It just doesn't work that way.. I've spent entire days trying to get a feature to work perfectly, often winding up with fewer lines of code than I started with. Were I to judge such progress by lines of code, an achievement would be transformed into a failure.

That's why I suggest going by TODO-list entries. Those are concrete things that you know need to get done. You can even score them in terms of anticipated difficulty, then try to reach a certain number of points per day/week.

Think of yourself more as an editor than an author. An editor might spend a lot of time re-factoring, looking up syntax, trying to make things flow better, asking people for advice, etc. Amassing words and lines isn't your goal.

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