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The Developer’s Sleep Framework: How Five Components Made Me a Better Engineer and Father
“What the hell was I thinking here?” I muttered, scrolling through an authentication flow that now looked like hieroglyphics.
It was 2pm on a Tuesday. I was staring at my own code from last week, completely unable to remember why I’d written it.
My teammate was waiting for an explanation of how it worked, and I — the person who wrote it, the tech lead, the dad who spent last night calming my 3-year-old after a nightmare while my wife was up with our 4-month-old — couldn’t remember the design decisions I’d made seven days ago.
“Um, give me a minute,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I’m just… trying to remember the approach here.”
My teammate shifted uncomfortably. “We kind of need this today. The whole team is blocked.”
“I know, I know,” I said, the pressure mounting as I stared at what might as well have been someone else’s code.
This wasn’t an isolated incident.
During sprint planning, I struggled to hold feature requirements in my head while mentally juggling Teo’s kindergarten pickup schedule.
In architecture discussions, I’d lose the thread mid-conversation after being awake with Teo, who now shared my bedroom so my…
