it would be hard to hear it over the roar of my mad typing on a mechnical keyboard
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
201–210 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#202I remember I was screen sharing while troubleshooting something at a new job. I hadn't really set up my mac, and most everything was still defaults until I got a working build/deploy. One of the founding engineers said "You should turn bells off on your terminal. If [the CTO] sees that, he will give you so much shit." I should have taken that weird but ultimately innocent interaction as a sign that I was walking into an absolutely insane environment.
It's a tangent, but the bell character is a left over from how people used to do what you are asking for. Your question just reminded me of that strange conversation and harsh reaction.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#203In the previous startup I worked at, we set up a PR action that played a celebration thingy after every PR merge. We used https://github.com/leokster/dingdong_sonos to play on the Sonos speakers. Fun little gimmick but not really as a usecase like colors for linting etc.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#204No. I also don't listen to music. I do, however, use colors, and the GUI over CLI, whenever possible.
Programmer preferences really differ, don't they... I listen to music, don't use colors, and prefer CLIs over GUIs. I also like my BEL to beep.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#205From [1] The story of PING: ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure. [1] https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~m…
That is like the beep for continuity testing that is provided by most electronic multimeters, which is very useful because both your hands and your vision are occupied with the tested equipment.
Most older DMMs. Modern ones synthesize a steady or intermittent tone in response to steady continuity. Older ones just use an instantaneous voltage threshold, which is much better for diagnosing an intermittent connection than the newer style, where the tone generator inadvertently does so much time averaging as to be useless outside steady state.
I keep a 30-year-old Triplett around more or less just for this reason. My Fluke from 2019 is much better at everything else, but...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xcode has this functionality. You can attach a system sound to a breakpoint. I used it exactly once when I was trying to determine if two events always happened in the same order and were always equally spaced in time. It worked well but drives you sort of mad after a while.
One interesting way of using this I've heard of; is attaching it to a `-[UIViewController dealloc]`, and being able to "hear" (or rather notice the lack of sound) retain cycles this way.
This is the way
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#207This 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…
Yes I’m very interested. I had exactly the same idea, but solved it using the “say” command and a random grab from a set of strings. I’m a Python dev and I’m happy to contribute to a project is you get it started.
I'll set it up on GitHub in 1-2 days and publish it on Hacker News.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#208This 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…
Sounds cool. I'm definitely interested. Were you procrastinating when you wrote this?
Maybe. :-)
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#209This 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…
The old SGI IRIX workstations had sound effects. (the OS is featured in the original Jurassic Park film with the very silly 3D file manager) It was literally like the hacker movies and predated most of them. Keystrokes, button presses, everything made a little noise. My first boss talked about the horror of the university computer lab full of them before they turned all the sounds off (as well as the absurd cost of o…
With a daemon approach and clever integration within applications that handle missing fifo correctly, all you need to do to get rid of the sounds is just stop the service. And it's also configurable, so you can set what actions actually do produce sounds.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#210I find default calendar notifications useless. They pop-up 15 minutes before the meeting so they get dismissed, out of site, out of mind. With an integration of Keyboard Maestro, iCalbuddy, Stream Deck and modified shell script I show the upcoming meeting on a Stream Deck key.
Stream deck key shows time of next meeting, how long until that is, with background colors changing as it approaches, and how many meetings remain for the day.
For the sound effect portion, at 1 - 2 minutes prior and at the meeting time, a sound effect is played giving me the heads up that a meeting is starting. Also at 1-2 minutes prior to meeting starting, the Sonos speaker in the office announces the meeting subject.