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Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#111

Post by dheera »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #99
criddell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you've configured your environment to use an audible alert for some condition, haven't you explicitly asked it to make the sound?

If I don't explicitly control that condition, then I would say not. Something like "./run-long-task.sh; say 'Task is done'" is fine. An audible alert when an email arrives or a build fails is hell.

I would absolutely love an office where every time a build fails there is a big "womp womp" sound in the office coming out of that person's machine.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#113

Post by yowayb »

drybjed wrote: post #56

This sounds like an idea borrowed from games or other media where doing certain actions results in an audible feedback. This is often done for the benefit of the audience, or to enhance the gaming experience, but I had an idea to implement this in my workspace to somehow influence my brain and make it more enticing to write code and somehow beat procrastination. I wrote a Python daemon which on startup loads small .w…

I think I could use a sound when I switch modes in Helix. Thank you for looking into this!

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#115

Post by washadjeffmad »

whatnotests2 wrote: post #74
donatj wrote: post #30

In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement. All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly eve…

Yes, this. Imagine an elevator, gas pump, vending machine, or laundromat emitting sound effects constantly. Quite the dystopian hellscape.

Just wait until they integrate the devices with AGI + TTS and either tie it to your ad history or one-click purchasing.

AI Fridge: "We noticed you're almost out of cheese. Would you like to make your dairy extraordinary today with Tillamook Sharp Cheddar? Say OK to order now!"

Enfleshened One: "No. Please self destruct."

AI Fridge: "...Take that back, or I'll wilt all your lettuce."

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#116

Post by boredtofears »

donatj wrote: post #30

In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement. All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly eve…

One of my first experiences with our home PC's was downloading wav files of movie and TV clips off of AngelFire and GeoCities sites and assigning different windows tasks to play them to prank my dad. Error dialog popup? Beavis and Butthead's "Breaking the law, breaking the law". Out of disk space? Johnny Mnemonic "I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head". He thought it was hilarious and would reassign them to his own clips that he found and we continuously tried one-upping each other to find the most annoying possible sound for every windows function.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#117

Post by wormlord »

donatj wrote: post #30

In around the year 2000, for career day I went to work with my uncle. He worked in IT for General Mills. Their office was very much a stereotypical poorly lit IT cave in the basement. All their computers were a constant barrage of custom pop culture sound effects for every action. Minimize a window and a computer would emit like a "Ooh baby" clip for instance. Place had the tone of a morning radio show. Seemingly eve…

This could be kind of fun if done in moderation. Maybe a git hook that lets the creator of the PR select a song to play over the speakers when the merge request goes through. Some people might get pissed off, but I think it would be nice to have a bit more whimsy in software dev. As long as everyone is on the same page, should be fine.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#118

Post by e28eta »

ElFitz wrote: post #85

For those interested, Xcode lets you configure sounds to be played when a breakpoint is reached. It can also be set up to conditionally play a sound. Those breakpoints can also be configured to continue running the app instead of pausing. It can quickly get out of hands though.

It can be super useful for detecting the timing or relative ordering of code blocks. Something like “what order are these 2-3 methods called in and does it vary?” is so easy to hear as you navigate through an app.

Or if you’re doing something async / interactive / whatever, and don’t want to stop the app, but do want to know when a code block executes.

I wish it had more short & distinctive sounds to choose from though! edit: I think I found this project while working at a previous job, but haven’t used it recently: https://github.com/matthewreagan/Xcode-Breakpoint-Sounds

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#119

Post by swah »

Same, I was surprised to find out how hard it was to play a sound everytime the word ERROR appeared on my terminal.

I even wanted to run a sound on the "positive case" ie a loop that is processing a few hundred items, could easily benefict from a subtle sound so you could feel when some request got hold...

Like virtually all hardware does ie your vacuum cleaner has something stuck and is not operating at 100% etc.

(I'm planning doing a "toy" terminal using a gamedev environment just to explore this a bit)

edit: If you use Raycast you can just throw confetti from the command line too for extra dopamine:

    open raycast://confetti

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#120

Post by mattlondon »

Something I have often thought about for years but never implemented was "sound logging" where you get specific points of your code to play audio clips or tones instead of/as well as logging to console etc.

The idea being that you can test the app.and hear the sound logs going off as you go. In a tight loop that executes quickly I would hope that you could hear something "being off" in the same way that a mechanic can hear if an engine is "running rough" etc.

Of course... It might just be a totally inscrutable and useless wall of noise too! Won't know until I try it out

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