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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?

#293

Post by selfhoster11 »

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’d love to get this for my own machines.

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

#294

Post by jbarberu »

I use a command that'll play a good/bad sound effect based on previous shell command exit code.

Something like:

  function boop() {
      local last="$?"
      if [[ "$last" == '0' ]]; then
          sfx good
      else
          sfx bad
      fi
      $(exit "$last")
  }
I'd then do:

  $ make -j; boop
or

  $ nmap ; boop
That way I can focus my attention elsewhere while waiting for stuff that'll take anywhere from 20s-2min without losing track of time.

Lately I've been experimenting with throwing in notify-send in there too, but find it a bit much to both get sound and visual feedback.

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

#295

Post by pilliq »

mattlondon wrote: post #120

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 ca…

A bit late to the party, but I had a similar idea a while back and built a prototype of this here: http://pilliq.com/companion

It's a "runtime" that executes arbitrary JS code while continuously playing a single tone. Every loop iteration increases the tone's frequency, and every recursive function call increases the tone's pitch (when the function returns, the tone's pitch is decreased).

  * There are visual markers to show what is currently being executed
  * You can increase or decrease the speed of playback
  * You write your own code and execute it in the browser.
I included two examples of fibonacci: one that's iterative and one recursive. I think the audio/visual feedback helps you "feel" the difference of why the iterative implementation is faster than the recursive one.

It's a bit of a hack, and you may need to refresh the page after it finishes running through the code once.

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

#297

Post by rldjbpin »

personally, as mentioned by others, a sound alert can be handy as an idea when a long-running background task finishes. this is especially pertinent for those on ssh sessions to another machine.

my spin for the workaround used to be echoing the "bell" symbol (07) in ASCII after the command finishes. but it would not respect the audio device i use while i tried it. definitely a good usecase for ricing your bash/zsh.

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

#298

Post by eternityforest »

throwanem wrote: post #205
adrian_b wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reaso…

What's really bad is when there's a literal 250ms or so delay...

I'm surprised someone hasn't made an open source DMM that lets people configure all the stuff people have been wanting for years.

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

#299

Post by pawelduda »

xandrius wrote: post #288
pawelduda wrote: post #22

https://github.com/kristiandupont/react-geiger This plays a click when React components rerender, to make you aware of the page performance

I'd love one for React-native, might look into making one if I don't find any :D

I think in case of React the core idea is simple. For example I would love something like this for Rails ActiveRecord to help you find n+1's by sound

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

#300

Post by danpalmer »

I have `blaze` (bazel) aliased to a command that runs whatever blaze command I'm trying to do and then rings the terminal bell. Any compilation, run, test, etc, all gets a visual and audible notification that it has completed.

This is great for my focus. Even if a build or test is only going to take 10s, I'll still change window to my email or chat. The ping brings me back.

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