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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?

#81

Post by jokab »

Obs studio. I record myself while coding anything. I pretend to be a bigshot coding streaming sensation (even if its just for me). Its fun as well as very helpful in so many ways.

1. It helps me stay focus on the task at hand. One recording for each task 2. It lets me practice how to articulate stuffs. Its like blogging but ephemeral (because i wont upload this) 3. It helps me get motivated. Cant let my "thousands" of viewers down 4. It lets me review my blunders so i know how to watch out for them in the future 5. Its fun. I can let off some steam because i can curse all i want, my audience is 18+ and fine with some "sentence enhancers". I am Filipino but i record in English so i get that extra bonus practice.

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

#82

Post by discreteevent »

ashnehete wrote: post #62
nikivi wrote: post #12

I usually comment with the same thing on these tip threads. And that is learn to rebind your keyboard. Make each key programmable modifier. Open apps, run scripts/macros instantly. My Karabiner config: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab... I go as far as binding keys to instantly type `console.log()` or `fmt.Println()` or the other language equivalent with my dot modifier key. Plus typing th…

Maintaining a Wiki or any sort of extensive note taking operation requires a lot of dedication and I guess practice? Do you have any tips for someone who wants to start out? Is there a smaller step that one could take initially?

Use mind maps. Its quick (much quicker than a wiki) and makes it really easy to reorganise a mess. Freemind/freeplane is good.

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

#85

Post by jjice »

notJim wrote: post #77

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…

Something that helps me is drawing/writing my own summary of what I just read or what a process is. For example: OAuth2 can be pretty confusing at first, but reading about the flow and drawing your own diagram helps me a lot to learn, as opposed to just reading. It also makes a nice reference for later, tailored to what I need most.

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

#86

Post by kovek »

What first came to mind for me is running. It’s very difficult for me to sit still for long periods of time, and so I end up switching tasks often. If I do a good run, I can stay still and focused for longer.

I believe longer contiguous periods of time developing are very helpful.

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

#87

Post by ra7 »

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…

I want to take notes everyday, but I keep getting bogged down by how to organize those notes so I can "look back" efficiently. Essentially, I want to avoid taking so much notes that I'm reluctant to search for something because I haven't organized it well. Do you think the ISO date name method is working well for you?

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

#88

Post by Uhhrrr »

XCSme wrote: post #60
dmortin wrote: post #41

If you have to look something up or solve something and it takes more than 2 minutes then write the solution down in your notes. Lots of times you'll need that again and you won't have to search for it again.

I am a bit conflicted about the note-taking part. If you keep writing notes, at some point you will have to search through all of them to find what you need. So you not only spend the time to write the note, you still have search for the solution and there's the risk of the solution becoming outdated (eg. maybe the problem now has a better solution due to new versions of software)

That's where org-mode (or some similar outlining or mind-mapping) comes in. It reduces your search from N to logN.

In general I find that logN is faster than solving the problem from first principles again (N!).

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

#90

Post by bandris »

chadlavi wrote: post #47
dceddia wrote: post #27

A couple others have mentioned shell tricks. One of my favorites is using Alt-. (in Bash and Zsh) to insert the last argument of the previous command. Press it multiple times and it will cycle through the last argument of all previous commands. It's great for when you want to, say, `ls thing` and then `vim thing`. Yesterday I went looking for a similar key that would insert a copy of the last argument on the current…

I assume you're talking about only on linux? On a mac `alt .` and `alt /` are mapped to characters ≥ and ÷

Esc-. is more portable. Works on mac too.
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