Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#331

Post by tasuki » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

wingmanjd wrote: post #290

Ninite's automated installers [1]. This one tool has saved me hundreds of hours back in my support days (both at previous sidejobs and family members' houses) in downloading, installing, and _updating_ basic applications. I could leave the tiny Ninite executable on their desktop with the instruction to just run it once a month and it would keep all their stuff up to date. [1] https://ninite.com/ Install or Update Mul…

I've been using APT for this with great success for the past 17 years! I guess it's also saved me quite a few hundreds of hours.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#332

Post by phist_mcgee » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

Throwing my hat in the ring for Justfile. It's basically a streamlined make.

https://github.com/casey/just

Where it really shines are in places like monorepos where you may have many inter-related setup scripts, build commands or helper utilities.

You define all of your commands in one file (or multiple if you want a hierarchy) and can run commands from any subdirectory.

eg. You have a monorepo with a web server, and also a react-native app in separate directories, you can call `just build-app` in the web directory, or call just `start-server` when your terminal's current directory is 7 diretories deep in the mobile directory.

The amount of time I have saved cd'ing around has honestly been amazing. It's worth it's weight in gold, especially on large projects.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#333

Post by tezza » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

Sorry to talk shop:

* All time King keeps on giving: MS Excel

* MS Visio… last good Sequence Diagrams etc

* Adobe Illustrator… keep visual scrapboards

* Perl one liners with cygwin getclip/putclip

* DBeaver SQL gui

* StreamDeck with Autohotkey custom actions

* SimpleNote - your notes everywhere when you need them for creation, reference and search

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#334

Post by pinkcan » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:19 PM UTC

docker compose is like using cheat codes

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#335

Post by mcs_ » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

Excalidraw (paid edition) Autopilot

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#336

Post by bb88 » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

dougdonohoe wrote: post #159

Gotta say IntelliJ, which isn't just for Java. It's a great coding platform and I used it for Scala, Go, Python, Bash, Java, PHP, Perl, you name it. I know many people like to hate on IDEs, but IntelliJ (and/or its language-specific variants like PyCharm or GoLand) has great support for all the debuggers in the above languages. It has awesome search/replace. Being able to "drill down" in to code, including 3rd party…

Pycharm for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#337

Post by boyter » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:22 PM UTC

Going to say my own https://github.com/boyter/scc/ which I have used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X"

It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was because I got caught out from another project, which wasted months of my time.

Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains IDE's in general.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#338

Post by lpolovets » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

Text Blaze (YC W21) has saved me about 50 hours over the past 18 months. They reduce repetitive typing across websites. For example if you have a common format for bugs you're filing, or LinkedIn messages or emails that you're sending, you can use Text Blaze to write most of the text for you. If you've used Superhuman snippets, this is similar but more powerful, and it works across the entire web instead of just email.

Time savings screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH (Disclosure: I liked the product so much that my fund ended up investing.)

Website: http://blaze.today/

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#339

Post by smusamashah » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

RipGrep has been a huge time saver. I work in huge legacy code base. Lots of modules, lots of content, lots of scripts. Sometimes I can just go to parent directory with all repos and search with RipGrep if ever needed.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#340

Post by smusamashah » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #104

daniel_reetz wrote: post #48

Ultrafast, super lite file search on Windows, Voidtools "Everything": https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ I haven't touched the Windows Search utility since I found it.

Everything paired with AstroGrep (or your favorite grep program) is the ultimate pair for searching on Windows. We pretty much force new devs to install these otherwise we watch them struggle for way too long.

I use RipGrep with it.