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

Or, if you don't have room for a whiteboard, there are neon-colored dry erase markers that are designed for use on windows.

I think this is often undervalued. It's not necessarily the typing speed, but the far larger slowdown caused by distractions like error correction, using the mouse, getting irritated and taking a break etc. Meauring words per minute in typing static text doesn't really show that up.

Also, it's something that's hard to appreciate the value of until you experience just how big a different it can make.

Strong typing skills also form a good foundation for learning Vim and other editor/stystem wide shortcuts, which can make the whole experience of interfacing with the computer an order of magnitude more efficient and enjoyable.

Fewer distractions means more uninterrupted thinkning time and better code.

I only write scripts so that I'm sure that certain repetitive tasks are done correctly - this is, for me, the value proposition of automation.

Learn your environment and learn it well (over time). Every single thing that seems like weird arcane magic invented by brilliant wizards is just code or words, and often not a lot of it. Go find that code and read it. Docs are good, but they are almost never complete enough, because truly exhaustive docs would simply be the code [1].

Similarly, with something like CSS or OAuth that have specs, blog/tutorial content often leaves out important details that will be relevant to you. If you get stuck, quit wasting your time with them, and go read the damn spec! If you're still stuck after that, go read the implementation.

Wherever you work, there is probably a page with like hundreds of ugly graphs of it. Learn what the graphs mean.

When you do this, a day will come where someone will say "Kanye, I've been banging my head all day on why users are sometimes seeing outdated results after updating their page". A little thing will happen in your head, and you'll say "That sounds like replication lag/a weird quirk of the CSS spec/a bug I noticed in the graphics code", and suddenly you'll discovered that you are the wizard.

I'm not saying to do this instead of doing those other things, or instead of whatever you're supposed to be doing. I'm saying do it as part of your practice of making software. You're probably gonna do it for like 40 years, so might as well make the investment.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation (Second time referencing this on HN today)

I don't use a wiki but instead use Bear (https://bear.app) which gives cross-referential tags and a slick sorted tree of tags. I tag every article ('note') with a set of tags at the top.

#d/2020/05/08 #fam/sis #fam/gifts — notes around a conversation I had with my sister today about potential gifts .

#d/2020/05/05 #recipes/dinner #recipes/c/italian — notes a ravioli recipe I made on 5/5. If I later make it for a group dinner, I'll tag it, too, so I can track when I made things for who and collect longitudinal feedback and recipe changes.

#todo/today is things that need to get done today; things that don't will get moved to other notes.