Sometimes it takes about a minute or two to fully compile an application. Believe me, that's a long time. You've obviously just looked at the code and just waiting to see some results, etc.
I was wondering, what do you do during that 1 to 2+ minutes?
swordfight on officechairs (sorry, no SO thread is allowed to not have an xkcd reference)
Get my ass out of the chair, maybe even stretch my legs a bit and fill up my mug (office next door to break room).
Or depending on the build I may watch output
Spend the two minutes coding in Python! (no compile needed...)
I write in C# 3.0 {cheerfully} and VB9 {regretfully}. One advantage they both share is that it takes almost no time to compile and run. 10 seconds mayhap.
I remember my builds used to take 30 minutes on a fast box (and you couldn't optimize it much, the damn link was 20 of that.
I took apart a hard drive and rebuilt it as a little guy (read/write head) surfing on the disks. Lots of the other pieces were scenery.
My boss told me later that he came in to lay me off one day (Took me a while to get the hang of C) and asked about it and I told him I made it during builds. He said it saved my job--kinda creative I guess. (I'm sure he didn't WANT to get rid of me, and later said he was really glad he hadn't.)
For me, an incremental build usually takes about 5 minutes so I will read some RSS feeds or post on SO. For full builds, it will take between 1 and 2.5 hours (depending on how many cores I use for the build), so I'll go play pool, play foosball, go out to lunch... sometimes all of the above. And it still won't be done when I get back. I try to always run the full builds overnight, but sometimes something happens (like the build is broken) and it totally kills my productivity for a day.
I generally stare blankly at the terminal. Sometimes I also twiddle my thumbs, or drum my fingers on my palmrest.
Take another sip of coffee and prepare for the next step (deploying, testing, whatever).
-R
it depends on the need. Most times I write notes. I use an exercise ball for an office chair, if I'm up to date on my notes, I do situps.
I code in ruby, so I never have to wait for a compile.
While I'm waiting for unit tests however... I make a coffee, drink it, go to the bathroom, read codinghorror and stackoverflow, and yawn a lot :-)
Since it took 3 minutes to compile, I would race it trying to finish a Rubik's Cube. (This is a very old story. In fact, s/compile/assemble !)