Improve your programming skills with 2 beers!
Alas! Imposter syndrome is real… One day, it hit me so hard I said, “Enough is enough. I have to do something about it.” So, I started going through Reddit, Youtube and every other platform that’s ever existed, looking for ways to be a ‘better programmer’. Hours of scrolling and all I could find was Leetcode, practice and other stuff you’d find everywhere. I wanted to give up until I came across the Ballmer Peak.
The theory that computer programmers obtain quasi-magical, superhuman coding ability when they have a blood alcohol concentration percentage between 0.129% and 0.138%.
That’s what Urban Dictionary has to say about this. In layman’s terms, drink two beers and becoming a literal programming god. Honestly, I don’t believe in this. Any sane person would know that you’d find programmers laying drunk on-campus of many of the tech giants the moment they set up a bar next to the cafe.
A little bit of googling may prove otherwise. Some articles have even compared booze to Popeye’s spinach! Steve Ballmer, is an incredibly energetic guy (not kidding check out his retirement speech). You’d think that with all this energy he’d have to spend a lot of time letting it out of him but instead he used to sit around, observing people (and himself). This constant observation led him to see the effects of this graph:
As we can infer from the graph given, moderate alcohol consumption does yield a notable increase in creative output. If we remove the typing out of it, programming is just creativity with computer software. The language is your paint, the functions you use, your style and the billions of devices capable of running the code, your canvas.
In my opinion, whenever people drink alcohol their brains tend to be unable to focus on things at hand which makes them carefree. If a person has a carefree attitude, they may not worry about the future and tend to take bold steps like trying out the wildest solution to fix the code.
This is a pretty cool phenomenon, would I try it before coding rounds? Certainly not. But if you wanted an excuse to drink beer you’ve got it :). Additionally, if you’re interested in maintaining the blood alcohol levels check this out: https://github.com/alexcrist/ballmer-peak.
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