Yes. I’ve modified maven so that it says “Success” or “Error” (with the command `say` of macOS). It’s very useful when you have a build of 30-50s that you execute dozens of times a day.
Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
231–240 of 336 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#232MacOs ships with the `say` command and once in awhile I'll do something like `longRunningProcess ; say its done`, but not beyond that.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#233I use `ping -a` so that when the host comes up, my terminal will beep.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#234When I've had longer-running test/lint suites in the past, I've added simple sounds to the ends of their run scripts (birds chirping for success, alarm blare for fail) that help me draw my attention back. I had an issue where I would go off and read the news, or social media, or whatever, when running my tests, then suddenly it would be twenty minutes later and not only would I have wasted fifteen minutes, I'd have forgotten what it was I was even doing...
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#235I've set my Slack notifications to the "Hummus" sound instead because it's a lot less stressful and funny. Yes it's on your Slack too. Join me in chickpea silliness.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#236I once configured a Jenkins instance to play different sound effects when certain builds would fail. Originally these were played out of our big office TV, but its speakers broke at some point. A few years later, a couple of new hires came up to me to tell me they thought their laptops were infected with malware, because it would sometimes make weird noises. Turns out they had Jenkins open in a browser tab, and it wo…
Lots of generational differences here: A opened the build while I’d just wait for the email in case of failure. Second, they kept it open, which in my time I wouldn’t have (Perhaps you neither, which would explain why you never noticed).
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#237Something 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 ca…
I recall seeing the following very neat idea on HackerNews some time ago, but can no longer find it:
The idea, if I remember correctly, was to intercept system calls and play a sound every time one occurred. So you'd get a series of beeps every time the disk was accessed, somewhat similar to the spinning noise from HDDs. It would play a different type of noise every time the network was accessed, memory was allocated or freed, and so on.
They reported that developers got pretty good at diagnosing and debugging their programs, purely from listening to it run.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#238From [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…
Love it! I use a similar Powershell script for testing cabling/changes. Laptop left on in middle of office with speakers turned up. So handy.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#239This 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…
Related: Juice is the non-essential visual, audio and haptic effects that enhance the player's experience. https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice
Thank you for this fantastic link! Seriously. Bookmarked and planning to share. :)
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?
#240I can't help envisioning such a thing with *Command and Conquer* announcer or *Warcraft 2* peasants. "Building ..." "Cancelled" "Unable to comply, building in progress" "Construction complete" "Cannot deploy here" "Job's done" etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW1qfrx_Lg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoMhMZZjbGg
I love this idea.
YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYTHONS