How do you spend the five minutes a build takes?
5 by paedubucher | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Building software or applying configuration changes (Ansible, Puppet) takes some time. If it's just a couple of seconds, you wait for it to finish. If it is a matter of hours, you do something else and check back later. But what do you do if a build takes about five minutes? Starting another task (like programming) is hardly possible, because you don't get anything meaningful done in five minutes. Checking emails, chat messages, or the the phone either doesn't fill up the time (no new messages) or just sidetracks you (starting another task that takes longer than five minutes). Checking some random websites or social media is also a bad idea, especially if you have a lot of those five minute builds during the day, because then it creates a habit of distraction. How do you spend that time?