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Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#351

Post by cheerlessbog »

Izkata wrote: post #254
ken wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Dvorak for the past few decades. As suggested by one of the other comments, it took about 2 weeks to learn well enough to get back to my normal speed (>80wpm). It makes a massive difference in comfort. 5 minutes typing at full speed on QWERTY and my wrists start to hurt. (I really don't know how people do it.) On Dvorak, I can type all day at full speed with no pain at all. Surprisingly, the keyboard hardwa…

> 5 minutes typing at full speed on QWERTY and my wrists start to hurt. (I really don't know how people do it.) Wrist-bending to maintain the home row, I suspect. I have a different, self-taught style that partially involves holding my hands above the keyboard and using muscles all along my arms to move my hands without bending my wrists much - never had any problems.

In my case switching to a keyboard with each hand at an angle (Microsoft Natural Keyboard) changed my life as the pain went away like a switch.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#352

Post by toohotatopic »

afc wrote: post #156

Probably an unpopular opinion but... Write your own text editor. I've been working on my own ( https://github.com/alefore/edge ) as a side project and using it exclusively for about six years. I don't expect it to be very usable by other people (it's very customized for my workflows, I suppose; e.g., it's mostly useful for writing C++ and Markdown files) but, because I know it inside out (and I've invested in making…

This has been put to the extreme by Chuck Moore [1]

> During the 1990s, he used his own CAD software to design several custom VLSI chips, including the F21 processor with a network interface. More recently, he invented colorForth and ported his VLSI design tools to it

[1] http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/about/bios.html

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#353

Post by lloeki »

city41 wrote: post #206

The biggest boost in productivity I've had in recent years is switching back to a statically typed language. TypeScript in my case. You can absolutely refactor and change course _so_ much quicker and with virtually no regressions at all. Just the other day we realized a feature I was building didn't handle an important case, and I had to really change the approach. Doing it in a JavaScript would have been dramaticall…

Incrementally adding Sorbet to some Ruby projects has been so. good.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#355

Post by Pawamoy »

myle wrote: post #340

Teminator. I see many people suggest tmux, but I have not seen suggestions for my favorite terminal emulator. Ctrl+Shift+E for vErtical split Ctrl+Shift+O for horizontal This is a killer feature. It is also much better than tmux because scrolling up is naturally supported. I always keep an instance of Teminator running full screen on one monitor and whenever I need another terminal, I just split the screen, or go to…

My favorite as well.

I think Terminator gave me a real boost on productivity. The split feature is great. And it has a lot more good things, like increase/decrease/reset text size, resize/rotate/expand or even drag-and-drop splits, grouping (to write in multiple splits at once), and the scrolling is done very well: scroll up a bit to stop following the output, scroll to bottom to follow again.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#356

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

albinofrenchy wrote: post #226
growlist wrote: post #37

Learn to touch-type properly. I'm not a shit hot typist or anything, but it does make hours on a keyboard more pleasant. And (hate me) I do judge other devs on it. If someone can't be bothered to invest a few tens of hours on such a key productivity enhancement then what does that say?

I'm really confused. I've only run into maybe one person working as a developer that didn't touch type. Is this really not nearly universal? My version of this would be learn not to use a mouse.

A lot of people type without having to look buy without using the proper technique, essentially doing hunt and peck with two or three fingers but with good muscle memory. Proper touch typing is about using specific fingers to specific keys and remaining on the home row when not in use.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#357

Post by SimonPStevens »

bbarn wrote: post #333

This is a bit of a departure from the question you asked, but I'm always amazed how much people tend to hyper-tune their dev environments, when in reality, most of my time is spent thinking how not to write code. I get just as much work done on a completely vanilla macbook with VS code installed on it as my editor-obsessed peers with obsessively optimized setups can. How much actual code are you writing? I'd be reall…

I spent quite as few years as a contractor and I quickly discovered the best way to be effective was to learn how to be effective with everything in the default settings. At every new place I went I could just jump right in. No need for any time spent fiddling with settings or tweaking and installing pluggins.

Although a slight counterpoint is that I also used to have my git settings file stored in a github gist so I could just grab my latest one and every new environment would have the same set of aliases I was used to.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#359

Post by lloeki »

chadlavi wrote: post #50

KEEP NOTES. Write everything down. Write down what you were thinking about, how you felt about decisions, things you tried for bug fixes. you never know when this stuff will be useful to you again. I keep really basic markdown notes in a git repo, roughly one file per day with an ISO date name, but some things I give a separate file name (still with the iso date, but with some descriptive words) for things that might…

Seconded. I finally skipped endlessly looking for the perfect note system and just created this stupid 10ish snippet of shell:

https://github.com/lloeki/dotfiles/blob/master/shell/notes

   note foo # creates a note in vim
   note # lists notes in vim’s netrw
Since note file names are time stamped, they’re sorted and I don’t have to care about dupe names. It defaults to creating as .md but renaming the file afterwards doesn’t matter.

It’s so dead simple that I use it all the time instead of fantasising about the perfect note system.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#360

Post by Joeri »

The things I've benefited from most are not tools but practices.

- Question the work

Always be questioning whether the thing you're doing really needs to be done. Is there a way to not do it? Is there a way to do something better instead?

- Park downhill

Before putting a project or incomplete task away, make notes of what the next thing was that you were going to work on. This lets you bypass that 10 minute orientation getting back into the project the next time you pick it up.

- Keep a single todo list outside of your head

You can only have one master, so keep a single todo list in order of priority. Whenever something pops up on your radar, put it on the list in the right spot and immediately forget about it. Check the todo list a few times a day to make sure you're working on the right thing, and whether you need to communicate that something low on the list won't get done in time. Aggressively try to weed out the list and remove as many items as possible, preferably by not having to do them (by reassigning, by replacing or by reprioritizing).

Benefits: (1) not forgetting to do any work, (2) free up your mind to focus on work instead of meta-work, (3) clear priorities, (4) detect early when work is going to get delayed.

To combine this with park downhill I either keep the per-task notes on what to do next right in the list (in a details field of the todo item), or I keep it somewhere else and have just a single top-level item "finish X" in the master list.

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