Ask HN: How do you work faster? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you work faster?

#11

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sun, Feb 03, 2013, 1:57 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #9

ebiester wrote: post #5

I think about this from time to time. How did I get there? How do I get further? I started off really bad. I've progressed to "good", and hoping to get to "great" someday. I've picked up this wisdom: 1. Learn an IDE and an editor. The IDE is useful for refactoring, for project management, for code completion, and other niceties. Your editor is there to lean on when you have to do some down and dirty editing. For exam…

>2. Great programmers don't have to worry about learning libraries -- they just figure them out. I would love to be able to do this. The amount of time I'll ponder on a library thinking "what are the internal mechanics of this?" can be quite frustrating. For OpenGL, for example, I have such a hard time processing a mental image of the system that I can't really figure out how to use it well. Every library should have…

That's what examples are for. Start from working code; make it your own.

Sure it helps to have a mental model. But how to achieve that? Expect it to take time, and digging right in and looking at those examples, and changing them to see what works.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work faster?

#12

Post by nvr219 » Sun, Feb 03, 2013, 3:15 PM UTC

Some thoughts:

1. Better to say "it will take me six weeks" and finish in five rather than saying it will take three weeks and finish in five. Even if it means you will lose a few bids.

2. Reuse your code and other people's code if available. I know this sounds obvious but not a lot of people do this. I don't code but I write reports and proposals and a lot of my content can be recycled with small tweaks between projects. I have seen coworkers rewrite entire pages that could have just been cut & pasted -- even from my report.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work faster?

#13

Post by pikewood » Sun, Feb 03, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

Everyone has a different weakness when it comes to coding. You'll need to review your own work and figure out what took longer than expected before you can figure out how to improve on it.

Some people spend too much time overthinking the design, others jump in too fast and spend their time reworking prior design flaws. Some take forever doing the UI, others get stuck in the DB. If you can figure out what caused the biggest delay with your last project, you'll see the largest improvement if you fix it. I'm sure questions on a specific problem will get more help from others as well.