A while ago, I read an interested post about “why programmers work at night:”
Working on large abstract systems involves fitting the whole thing into your mind – somebody once likened this to constructing a house out of expensive crystal glass and as soon as someone distracts you, it all comes barreling down and shatters into a thousand pieces.
This applies to designers, too. My job as a designer is more than just designing and coding individual screens — I’m usually focused on how this whole “abstract system” (a collection of screens in a varied number of flows) looks from the outside. This takes time. Uninterrupted time.
…programmers work at night because it doesn’t impose a time limit on when you have to stop working…
This is the big reason. Sitting down to work at 10pm gives me about 4 hours of uninterrupted time. Time I can use to fit a complicated system into my brain, and make it better.
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