Ask HN: How do you deal with long compile times?

[caspervonb]

What do you spend your time on while something is building for an hour or more?

I end up doing reviews and triaging issues, but of course 30 minutes or longer to wait on a compile breaks focus.

[laydn]

Writing documentation of the changes that were made, Writing test cases for the code that I just added, Writing a detailed commit message for the changes...

...and trying to figure out if the compile time can be reduced!

[mryalamanchi]

Focus is not usually the problem here. It's actually context-switch.

Avoid any task that has high context-switch cost.

[thanatos519]

Go for a walk.