1–10 of 137 posts
If you are a highly productive person (and yet have a good work-life balance), could you share your methods?
The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly familiar with all the tools, enough that you have your API calls completely committed to memory.
If you look at most programmers who have a reputation for being insanely productive, they all follow this pattern. Fabrice Bellard works pretty much exclusively in C, mostly on signal-processing or low-level emulation. Rob Pike works all in Go using the plan9 stack. John Carmack is all games and 3D graphics, using OpenGL. Jeff Dean has two major interests - distributed systems and large-scale machine learning - and works basically exclusively in C++.
I read an interview with Guido van Rossum, Jeff Dean, and Craig Silverstein within Google where they were asked basically the same question, and the answer all of them gave was "The ability to hold the entire program in your head."
Because of this, I beg anyone who wants to be as highly productive as I was to please take care of your body and your mind. It's better to be productive for forty years than highly productive for two years and then dead.
I don't want to hear about another dead hacker.
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
In 2007, I finished my bba, received an angel investment, and started a company. Three months later (and with my investor's enthusiastic support), I started a non-profit street magazine. About two years later, I ended up in hospital with stroke symptoms and blood pressure on the 'how are you alive?' end of the scale. Because of this, I beg anyone who wants to be as highly productive as I was to please take care of yo…
I noticed that when I make lists of things to do, and I see progress on the items ticked off, I know I am productive. No anxiety after that. (I usually write down the number of hours taken to complete each task and sometimes flip through the list to reassure myself with indulgent self-adulation).
Without the list, even though I am killing items, I still feel unproductive. It's that bizarre.
Make a list! :-)
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
There are memory improvement techniques, developed over centuries, which can help. Think of it as latency reduction in a source code memory palace.
1. when I have a ton of things to do, I schedule or bucket them and then work on one at a time. My giant todo list is in a different doc and I only have a mini one with up to 3 tasks that I look at regularly. When I remove those tasks, I add the next three. Then you only have 3 things to do instead of 300. Small hack but works great to not feel overwhelmed.
2. Practice your focus and willpower so that you can stay on one item at a time and not feel like you need to check FB/email/etc every 5 minutes. For some people this is really hard, but it is a skill you can improve.
3. Figure out the fastest, easiest and most efficient way to do things and then do it that way. This covers everything from the commute to coding and project management.
4. If your office is driving you crazy, schedule "meetings" on your calendar to block out dedicated work times. Put your headphones on. If people still don't get the hint, tell them you are busy working on x right now and can talk to them in an hour.
5. Most importantly, work when you are working and live when you are not. I don't check my email on weekends. People have my phone number and if something is important they will text me. Leave your work at home. Even if you are the CEO most things can wait until you get back in the office.