No code is faster than no code.
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
71–80 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the right answer. The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. In a sentence: Be able to visualize the problem in your head first. The actual code, if it's elegant and succinct, is incidental.
> The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. This seems antithetical to the post above yours. Or at least how I'm reading it. In bigger tech co's this looks a lot like massive design documents with a dozen reviewers, all giving enormous amounts of time and thought to the idea in the pursuit of "building it right". Design processes that can take weeks…
I would say analysis paralysis: no. Strategic thinking/designing: yes.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may want to NOT underestimate one's ability to add TONS of if/elseif/else (or switch/case) statemens in order to put things on track... There are various cases of „programming hoorrors” stories where you have a calculator implementation that, instead of doing the ... you know, math, will actually go through all X combinations.
I just had a recent situation like this which initially presented as a simple calendar / due date list, but then spiraled into some dreaded fuzzy set of if/then cases as the client began to add requirements for due dates of certain items in a certain order that would take priority over other items due on the same date, or missed items, or future items that could be done in advance. After two weeks of increasing horro…
Can you share or summarize the blueberry muffin email?
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#74Can someone elaborate on how they use reg ex as a productivity boost?
Do you use it for text transformation? How do you use it exactly? Do you use it as code itself or as a tool to help you explore/write code?
I am a huge fan of Macros, I 100% understand their role in text transformation, but what problem does regex solve? I spend so much time trying to remember the correct syntax, it only ever works for me when solving a specific code problem, but Ive never used it in one-off workflow problems.
Curious if I have missed some huge place where it is helpful.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about this idea a lot recently. I'm decently new to the big-tech-co space, but it does seem like a huge amount of resourcing goes into design and defense of projects. I wonder what y'all think about someone doing a timeboxed MVP (a sprint or less?) as a way of susing out design, and THEN getting reviewers/etc? Obviously you have to take security into large consideration when doing things like this…
Hell, wait till you find out how much time is wasted in Dev/Ops just changing the tooling every year or two, literally tearing down and rebuilding everything you already have in the name of staving off another couple years of technical debt. It's silly. I'm a bit of a rarity in the modern world (and here in the corporate space that is HN), in that I'm the sole programmer on a bunch of large software projects in produ…
What happens if you get hit by a bus or just want to take a vacation? I think this is more about your inability to work with other people than it is about you truly being a 4-8x coder.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#76I mean, this sounds narrow, but going off of what you think are 10x multipliers, in terms of getting more bang for your hour/buck: * Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies * Embracing garbage collection in JITted runtimes, mainly JS for now * Being able to diagnose and replace a squeaky belt in your car * Know what a cat is saying when it meows at you and indicates something in the vici…
Replacing the cat with a obedient well trained dog, may increase happiness.
Seriously, well trained dogs are perhaps the biggest life hack a person can do.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#77There are few productivity boosters greater than spending time learning the tools you use in and out. This goes for hotkeys in software all the way to quirks about a language.
Not only that, but spend time learning your tools as you use them. If you're like me, reading about a tool for four hours then trying to recall that information while using it is a wasted effort. You have to be continuously learning in increments over weeks, months, and maybe even years. Never stop learning.
It's painful at first, learning something while doing it, because it breaks your flow, it's like constantly being interrupted.
But it's so worth it in the end, +1 for learning while doing.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#78I mean, this sounds narrow, but going off of what you think are 10x multipliers, in terms of getting more bang for your hour/buck: * Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies * Embracing garbage collection in JITted runtimes, mainly JS for now * Being able to diagnose and replace a squeaky belt in your car * Know what a cat is saying when it meows at you and indicates something in the vici…
> Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies That might be very useful for me, but my career has taken a different track, and I have never needed that. I almost never touch SQL, and never in a situation where performance matters. However I know that I can look that up if I need it (or more likely find someone else - I expect looking it up will take months)
eh, I only brought it up because SQL is a funny beast. You have to think like the optimizer in some cases. I recently found a report query that was taking >90 seconds to execute. It was looking at something like 2 billion records, but it shouldn't have taken that long. It really tangled my mind. Each of the records had a `start` and `end` timestamp, and were being collated in a join on a separate key and sorted by MAX(`end`). So there's a joint key on the table that is start+end, but not a separate key for each. I figured out the query could be speeded up by about 80% if I added a parameter for `start`, a meaningless WHERE `start`>0 even though I didn't need one. Basically any start would be OK, I just had to have it there because even forcing key on the start/end index didn't kick the optimizer into realizing it needed to search that as a hash space. I don't know. It was a feeling. This is just in the vein of someone asking, "what is jujitsu to you?" But no, don't learn it if you don't need it.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#79Basic debugging knowledge is helpful, but I've found the ability to think about distributed, networked systems all the way down at the system level to be extremely helpful. We all encounter systems that are ill-documented, or complete black boxes, but peering at them with tools like `strace` / `jstack` (when a service is doing something itself with data) and `tcpdump` (when a service is asking another service to do something) opens up all sorts of possibilities.
Yes, distributed tracing tools do a much better job of this, but it's not always a given that a service will be instrumented. The generic tools (almost) always work.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#80Communicating sequential processes for multithreading (usable in all languages that support threading and blocking data-transfer-structures).