Emacs key bindings work system-wide on macOS. Having the same keys to navigate no matter what app you’re in is a huge productivity booster.
Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
101–110 of 532 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#102What first came to mind for me is running. It’s very difficult for me to sit still for long periods of time, and so I end up switching tasks often. If I do a good run, I can stay still and focused for longer. I believe longer contiguous periods of time developing are very helpful.
I just recently noticed this too. I have a bit of ADHD and I've found it helps me follow meeting discussions and such. Can't quite explain it because being tired should make focusing harder (and true, I'm probably a slightly less effective coder than normal right after a run, just because of tiredness). But for whatever reason I've noticed it's much easier to follow other people's lines of thought and catch the important details after a good workout.
Edit: upon further reflection, I think the big difference is it's a few-hour boost in self confidence. So it's much easier to follow conversations and ask probing questions, rather than being afraid to ask things for fear of looking foolish.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#103Close Hacker News. Close Reddit. Close Twitter. Close Facebook.
While I suspect anyone reading this is going to detect at least a small hint of sarcasm, its true. Minimize distractions like this and unsurprisingly, productivity goes up.
My biggest one, to add, is having set time for handling administrative tasks, like Email etc. If you can (and I realize all people have caveats), just set a block of time in the morning and in the afternoon to answer email, and otherwise ignore it unless its been flagged a certain way.
This is what I do
first 30 minutes of my day, I do email catch up before my stand up. After the stand up I take about 15 minutes to update the KanBan, and then thats it for my admin tasks at that point. I may check email again (well I almost always) about half an hour before I leave for the day. The only exception is specific flags I have set and those will always notify.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#104The REST Client VSCode extension[0] let's you send HTTP request from any file open in the editor. I use it to call the Cloudflare API to purge the cache of my site after I make changes. It's also really useful to test new APIs or quickly create a bunch of file/requests for the current project. I use PHP on my landing page[1] so I can make changes and publish them immediately without any build step. This way, whenever…
Same for IntelliJ-based editor! It's incredibly useful to store the .http files inside git repos, an have it tracked alongside with code. It's similar to Postman or Insomnia, but tracked (and synced), and built-in
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#105Remap the Caps lock button to escape.
Remap the caps lock to control for emacs users :)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#106Contrarian opinion, but often doing things manually rather than automated will save you time. Writing/debugging a script is fun, but more often than not it would have been faster to do things the dumb way. If a task is risky or repetitive daily, then sure, but often developers confuse "writing a script because too lazy to manually do the work" vs "get the task done as fast as possible".
Another contrarian opinion, but as much as configuring and tweaking conf files are fun, it's still faster in the long run to be highly efficient on a new system as fast as possible. It's also convenient to use standard tools to be effective on someone's else computer. For instance, it's much better if you can be productive by changing 2-3 keys in macOS settings instead of being forced to use a fancy keyboard layout a…
Respectfully, I've never understood this viewpoint. If the configuration options are importable from some external repository (as the vast majority of dotfiles are), "as fast as possible" simply becomes "how quickly can I install git (or my VCS of choice) and pull down my configuration options?"
For keyboards and other physical hardware, sure, you can't remap on the fly. But I'd wager the the vast majority of productivity-customizations that people implement are software-level.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#107- Your eyes are the only broadband connection into the brain, and they have millenia of pattern recognition training built into them. When solving problems like debugging, refactoring or data preparation, consider arranging information in a way that takes advantage of this. When it's in the right shape, irregularities or patterns will often just jump at you.
- Relatedly, your eyes are also extremely well-adapted to detecting movement and optical flow. Do these two images/texts/logs/terminal outputs/etc. differ? Do they differ if you ignore the hue/time stamps/pwd? Alt-tab back and forth between them and you will notice. (Beware of fancy effects or menus covering it though - it has to be an instant switch from one to the other).
- Become fluent in regular expressions (recommendation: https://regexcrossword.com/).
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#108I use a 4k TV as a monitor - I can easily see full size my code editor, terminal output, a page of documentation and the web app/site I'm working on all at once. It cuts down tremendously on the back and forth switching and reloading of things that don't feel like they take up much time but do materially eat into things.
Would you mind sharing the model? I tried using my Hisense but it wouldn't work. And I've read that TVs won't always work properly as monitors, but then obviously there's a much wider and cheaper choice of TV panels than dedicated monitors.
2x of these:
Samsung
UN40KU6290FXZA
You are aiming for something that supports both 4K (3840x2160) [or greater I suppose] and a 60Hz refresh rate in that mode. On cheaper models this can be found on a HDMI2.0 input. More expensive ones might have DisplayPort as an option.
Shop around during TV season and you can find a quality model for $200/ea.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#109Contrarian opinion, but often doing things manually rather than automated will save you time. Writing/debugging a script is fun, but more often than not it would have been faster to do things the dumb way. If a task is risky or repetitive daily, then sure, but often developers confuse "writing a script because too lazy to manually do the work" vs "get the task done as fast as possible".
People should realize that any kind of system or process comes at the cost of improvisation, which is always faster and lower overhead. Doing literally anything other than doing things as they come has a cost. The gamble you're making when you write documentation, automate a test, or even write code to begin with is that the investment in doing that thing will pay dividends sometime in the future.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#110Spock testing framework. To let me do TDD.