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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?

#91
post #87

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?

It's mostly for sorting and context. I just do a straight up search (in my case in vscode) across all notes when I want to find notes about something particular.

Really the most important thing to do is just start taking notes. You can reorganize later if you need to.

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

#92
Never waste time logging in again:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@[IP address]:/home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys

Make aliases for your most common commands. Someone in a similar thread posted a script for parsing your history to find them out. For me they were all git subcommands.

Write a script the second time you have to do something.

On a macro level: Don't work on doomed projects. Don't update tools in the middle of a project unless the current version is a roadblock.

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

#93
post #39

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?

Same. Learn to type ~100 words/minute, I was surprised by how much more productive it has made me. Using a touch type trainer for a minute or two can also be a little mental break from writing software for hours.

I can touch type but can't get much faster than 60-70 WPM. I've been practicing for years. Any tips for speed?

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

#94
post #11

Contrarian opinion, but often doing things manually rather than automated will save you time. Writing/debugging a script is fun, but more often than not it would have been faster to do things the dumb way. If a task is risky or repetitive daily, then sure, but often developers confuse "writing a script because too lazy to manually do the work" vs "get the task done as fast as possible".

Third time you do the same thing, you should probably write some script for it.

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

#97
post #92

Never waste time logging in again: scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@[IP address]:/home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys Make aliases for your most common commands. Someone in a similar thread posted a script for parsing your history to find them out. For me they were all git subcommands. Write a script the second time you have to do something. On a macro level: Don't work on doomed projects. Don't update tools in the middle of a proj…

But instead of this:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@[IP address]:/home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys

you can use this:

ssh-copy-id me@[IP address]

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

#99
post #92

Never waste time logging in again: scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@[IP address]:/home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys Make aliases for your most common commands. Someone in a similar thread posted a script for parsing your history to find them out. For me they were all git subcommands. Write a script the second time you have to do something. On a macro level: Don't work on doomed projects. Don't update tools in the middle of a proj…

But instead of this: scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub me@[IP address]:/home/me/.ssh/authorized_keys you can use this: ssh-copy-id me@[IP address]

Nice, thanks!

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

#100
Instead of commenting your code once in a while make it default. I started always commenting and documenting my code (even the simplest parts for consistency) and it dramatically improved my productivity when I revisited if afterwards.

10x multiplier if you're working with a team.

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