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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?

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to subthread hear from people if alternate keyboard layouts have made a difference. ?

Moved to Colemak and learnt touch typing on it directly (to take advantage of the mental break). Really improved my "writing feeling", solved some nagging RSI issues and in general helped in "well-being". I don't type particularly fast, but I type way smoother, which is what feels good. I can't recommend Colemak enough, although I have never convinced anyone (in around 3 years).

Greetings to a fellow Colemak user. I've used Colemak for about 7~8 years now. It's really interesting to see home row keys polished to a shine, while others aren't.

I do always change one thing, and recommend it for others too, is to change caps-lock into a control.

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

#482

Use procrastination against itself. So basically, when procrastinating, we tend to justify our inactions: just 1 more minute on Twitter, just one last scroll on my newfeed, lemme just check this subreddit really quick. With reverse procrastination, you trick your brain into doing your intended task: Ok lemme just open Visual Studio Code and edit this one file then im good, I'll just change this one line of code, I'll…

The hardest part of this trick maybe being conscious of our actions while auto-pilot is often the default behavior.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for posting this. A couple of months ago I built out the design then all the FE code for a prototype app, and recorded the whole process as J was doing it, mainly as an experiment to see where o could improve a few aspects of my designing/developing. It was all a huge faff as I was just recording short screen captures using QuickTime. But it's definitely the most productive I've been for a very long time, a…

One thing that helped me was screen recording my editor session and then re-watching it on the highest playback speed. You start to get a feel for the arc of laying out the code, what refactoring operations look like. Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc. Watching your actions get played back, allows you to re-think those thoughts but in the third person. Mirrors help, video helps, we are no…

> Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc

In which language do you code?

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moved to Colemak and learnt touch typing on it directly (to take advantage of the mental break). Really improved my "writing feeling", solved some nagging RSI issues and in general helped in "well-being". I don't type particularly fast, but I type way smoother, which is what feels good. I can't recommend Colemak enough, although I have never convinced anyone (in around 3 years).

Greetings to a fellow Colemak user. I've used Colemak for about 7~8 years now. It's really interesting to see home row keys polished to a shine, while others aren't. I do always change one thing, and recommend it for others too, is to change caps-lock into a control.

For a long while I've had C-M-A mapped in caps lock, then I moved to using a Gergo (60% split ortho) programmed with QMK, so it's now mostly my own layout, specially for modifiers (see [here](https://mostlymaths.net/2020/01/new-keyboard-gergo.html/))

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

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that helped me was screen recording my editor session and then re-watching it on the highest playback speed. You start to get a feel for the arc of laying out the code, what refactoring operations look like. Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc. Watching your actions get played back, allows you to re-think those thoughts but in the third person. Mirrors help, video helps, we are no…

> Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc In which language do you code?

I take it they're speaking generally, as that covers all languages: map something to data, take that data and do something to it, map it back out to something a human or computer wants.

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for posting this. A couple of months ago I built out the design then all the FE code for a prototype app, and recorded the whole process as J was doing it, mainly as an experiment to see where o could improve a few aspects of my designing/developing. It was all a huge faff as I was just recording short screen captures using QuickTime. But it's definitely the most productive I've been for a very long time, a…

One thing that helped me was screen recording my editor session and then re-watching it on the highest playback speed. You start to get a feel for the arc of laying out the code, what refactoring operations look like. Most code is selection, map, map, filter, reduce, re-join, etc. Watching your actions get played back, allows you to re-think those thoughts but in the third person. Mirrors help, video helps, we are no…

> Mirrors help, video helps, we are not ourselves, once you realize that, optimization becomes much easier.

It's funny, in two of the areas I've worked in (tailoring and illustration) I was taught techniques that are analogues to this. With illustration, if you draw from a reference, one of the ways to improve accuracy is to turn the reference image upside down, which basically stops your brain seeing it as the thing it is an image of. Instead it becomes a structure of shapes, it's easier to draw. With tailoring, when cutting on a model/dummy, I was taught to continually check the work in a mirror instead of always looking directly at it -- again, I think a way to stop the brain automatically filling in structures and shapes, to force it to see the piece as a whole from a different perspective.

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

#490
Introducing tiling manager to my workflow: [0]i3

Like tmux in terminal, i3 for every GUI app. On a dedicated screen / workspace I run apps like browser, slack etc - and having them split the space automatically is super convenient.

[0] - https://i3wm.org/screenshots/

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