Sleep!
Alex Koppel • Lyon, France • Talk

Date: August 22, 2012
Published: August 24, 2012
Announced: unknown

Sleep: we all do it, and yet somehow it's hard (as most of us can attest every morning). It's also really relevant: as thinkers, creators, and problem solvers, anything that makes our brains less effective matters. Missed sleep makes a difference -- even two fewer hours a night quickly produce measurable cognitive impairment. Things get more interesting when we look at why it's so hard: our sleep cycles are determined by our internal clocks, which often put us in conflict with society's timetables, leaving many of us in a state of "social jet lag", as if we'd been traveling a timezone or more every day. That's not how any of us want to code (or live), I think, and by understanding how and why so many of us are constantly tired, we can start to make things better.

Alex Koppel is Just Another Rails Developer at 6Wunderkinder and the author of the Koala Facebook gem. Before joining the 6W team in Berlin, he helped build a leading social marketing platform, led part of a massive healthcare IT installation in California, and moonlighted as an online bookseller. An amateur cook, eager language learner, and inveterate book reader, Alex dual majored in computer science and scavenger hunts at the University of Chicago.

Ruby Lugdunum Conference 2012