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Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#21

Post by dreeves »

copperx wrote: post #15
poppingtonic wrote: post #9

Use this perl project called TagTime " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dreeves/TagTime> to track your own time. Description from GitHub: To determine how you spend your time, TagTime literally randomly samples you. At random times it pops up and asks what you're doing right at that moment. You answer with tags. Use Beeminder , a commitment device with a sting. Make a commitment, and give them a price (in USD) for f…

Beeminder sounds like a great idea, but there's something stopping me from using it. Every time I try to set a new goal on Beeminder just before I set the dollar amount I hear myself say "this is really stupid" and promptly cancel. I know that if I feel guilty about paying those $5 per transgression I can just lie to the app, which makes the whole thing pointless. I understand that the whole idea is to be honest to y…

(I'm a Beeminder cofounder) This is good feedback; thank you! We're mostly ok with targeting the particular psychology that this kind of thing works for (our very self-serving characterization thereof: http://blog.beeminder.com/typebee ) but what about adding enough social accountability that you wouldn't cheat? We don't have many social features but you can just point some friends/family at the url of your Beeminder graph.

Or maybe a better answer is to automate the data entry (we have dozens of integrations -- GitHub, Trello, Fitbit, RescueTime, etc) so that you'd have to do more than lie to the app. With enough effort you could still cheat, of course.

Would love to hear if this is overcomeable or a dealbreaker!

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#22

Post by dreeves »

poppingtonic wrote: post #19
copperx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beeminder sounds like a great idea, but there's something stopping me from using it. Every time I try to set a new goal on Beeminder just before I set the dollar amount I hear myself say "this is really stupid" and promptly cancel. I know that if I feel guilty about paying those $5 per transgression I can just lie to the app, which makes the whole thing pointless. I understand that the whole idea is to be honest to y…

Push the responsibility one step away from yourself. Since the goal needs data from you, then you can connect the goal to something like github, RescueTime, TagTime, Complice, etc. Or design your own service for your own personal needs [please do this if nothing exists]. Example with GitHub: if, to lie to Beeminder through GitHub, you have to make a fake commit, push and pull request, then you're already part of the…

Ha, you said this much better than me! Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#23

Post by poppingtonic »

dreeves wrote: post #21
copperx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beeminder sounds like a great idea, but there's something stopping me from using it. Every time I try to set a new goal on Beeminder just before I set the dollar amount I hear myself say "this is really stupid" and promptly cancel. I know that if I feel guilty about paying those $5 per transgression I can just lie to the app, which makes the whole thing pointless. I understand that the whole idea is to be honest to y…

(I'm a Beeminder cofounder) This is good feedback; thank you! We're mostly ok with targeting the particular psychology that this kind of thing works for (our very self-serving characterization thereof: http://blog.beeminder.com/typebee ) but what about adding enough social accountability that you wouldn't cheat? We don't have many social features but you can just point some friends/family at the url of your Beeminder…

Hi, dreeves! The Complice integration is the best thing yet! I'm wondering how many other kinds of such services can be added like this.

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#24

Post by chx »

Twenty minutes. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-first-20-minutes-after-wo... this is amazing.

Elevate your command line game:

autojump https://github.com/wting/autojump

ag https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Use zsh and put this in .zshrc https://gist.github.com/chx/f9509cb2db6595be334ca2404fac8a91

Now you can jump to directories freely with just j afewcharactersfromthedirname, search their contents with ag super fast and if you ever figured out something on the command line, you can recall it after this. For example, I remember I was searching dangling commits with awk so I do Ctrl+Rgit*awk and there it is. (I posted this particular command to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21903972/search-for-strin... but that's less relevant to the topic here so I won't repeat here.)

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#25

Post by geocar »

Go outside.

It's not just important to actually enjoy the life you're trying to hack together, it's also healthier, and if neither of those reasons will convince you, it'll also make you a better programmer: Too many programmers think they need to get in front of a screen to start "programming", when in actuality they're just spending themselves, and responding to what they see. Only thinking about the problem fully will make your programs smaller and faster.

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#26

Post by cyberferret »

Have another, totally unrelated to coding (or even computer) passion nearby to your work desk that you can go to in order to reboot your brain from time to time.

I have my collection of guitars behind my work desk, and every time I am waiting for a download or process to run, I force myself to NOT just open another browser tab for Facebook/Youtube or revisit my emails and instead reach for an instrument and take my brain to another place for a short while by playing something or practicing some scales/modes.

I also do this when I start feeling overwhelmed with to-do tasks or debugging tricky code. Forcing my brain to think about something completely different and then coming back prevents burnout for me and makes me come back to problems with a different mindset.

Never mind if it is a musical instrument, your cat, card tricks, painting - whatever. Take a mental break.

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#27

Post by kol »

roryisok wrote: post #3

Use a clipboard manager. I wish I'd started this a lot earlier in life. The amount of times you need the second last thing you copied is surprising. I went through a few before I settled on Ditto, which works over remote desktop too.

I use Diodon on Ubuntu.

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#28

Post by Gurrewe »

roryisok wrote: post #3

Use a clipboard manager. I wish I'd started this a lot earlier in life. The amount of times you need the second last thing you copied is surprising. I went through a few before I settled on Ditto, which works over remote desktop too.

Yes! I would recommend to use the clipboard manager in Alfred if you are on a mac.

Re: Ask HN: What are the cool life hacks for Developer?

#29

Post by dreeves »

poppingtonic wrote: post #23
dreeves wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm a Beeminder cofounder) This is good feedback; thank you! We're mostly ok with targeting the particular psychology that this kind of thing works for (our very self-serving characterization thereof: http://blog.beeminder.com/typebee ) but what about adding enough social accountability that you wouldn't cheat? We don't have many social features but you can just point some friends/family at the url of your Beeminder…

Hi, dreeves! The Complice integration is the best thing yet! I'm wondering how many other kinds of such services can be added like this.

We're working on making it nice and streamlined to add them! So, lots, we hope! Let us know what you think we should add next.
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