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

Don't push a commit with a new feature without tests and documentation. Even for your personal projects.

I started doing this a couple of years ago and it's hard to overstate the positive impact this has had on my macro productivity. I can come back to a project I haven't touched in six months and instantly start productively making improvements.

Tests and documentation really are for future you.

Automate repetitive tasks that can be automated. A task may take ten minutes. Automating it may take hours, and thus seems too expensive.

If this task is going to be done many times, then the automation WILL pay off. Running the automated task might take less time than the manual steps. And you can be doing something else.

The more of these kinds of tasks that you can automate, the bigger of a lever it becomes.

One of the oldest examples would be 'make'.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1205/

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 line, like for when you want to copy or rename a file to a similar name in the same directory, as in `cp some/long/path/to/foo.txt some/long/path/to/foo2.txt`.

I couldn't find a command for this, so I made my own Zsh "widget" and bound it to Alt-/ so now I can type `cp some/long/path/to/foo.txt` and hit Alt-/ to prefill the second arg. I put the code for it up here: https://gist.github.com/dceddia/0a45a88dd61cbdf1be023d0a8f15...

Mildly off-topic but I find that exercising in the morning or during lunch break gives me the biggest efficiency boost ever.