I never really was into drinking/smoking. But two days ago I smoked full cigarillo and drunk 1/2 glass of white wine at my backyard staring at clear sky in the late evening.<p>After getting back to my laptop I've found I could concentrate on particular task which is not that complicated, but definitely require quite a lot of concentration (migrate data between old and new app's db with quite different schemas and logic)<p>I was able to sit at it for a few hours and really did quite a big chunk of work successfully. All of it being a bit tipsy (since I really never drink, even small doses of alcohol/smoke affect me quite a lot)<p>I am wondering, what is other developers experience is regarding alcohol and smoking?
Occasional/moderate stimulation of this sort can be a big boost to concentration, just like a change in your daily environment. However, I wouldn't rely on it! Enjoy a drink or a smoke in moderation for pleasure, and if you feel moved to do work (and have a backup...) then great. But if you need to do work and must smoke a cigarette or something to get in the mood, then you are on the way to an unhealthy addiction.
Drunk Coding is Dangerous.
A few weeks ago, I had a few (too many?) glasses of wine. Spent about 6 hours trying to code some recursive function in order to migrate data stored as adjacency list in mysql to nested set.<p>Literally wasted the entire evening struggling.<p>Woke up the next day and bashed it out in about 15 minutes.