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.
Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
41–50 of 532 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#42Have a sharpened pencil and stack of paper handy always. I can't say how many times it's saved me a lot of trouble programming some behavior because I was able to draw a picture of what I wanted it to do.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#43[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#44Avoid being an early adopter of new technology despite everyone on HN raving about it. Instead focus on solving actual business needs that grow revenue or profit margins.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#45Emacs
It's a useful tool even if you use something else for coding. Org mode is very good. Magit too.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#46password manager
Which one do people here recommend?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#47A 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 ÷
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#48Honestly these posts seem like the equivalent of "lifehacks" for devs to me :D
The only protip I have is to think through a task on paper before you start writing code. Scope it if unclear, sequence it into small chunks, do more technical design if its a complex change etc. See if you can reuse existing code/libraries to do what you need.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#49Learn 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?
I've using this site for improving my touch-typing:
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#50KEEP 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 be good to re-access or are part of a series of similar notes (like a TIL file or a recurring meeting with the same person).