autojump[1] is really helpful especially if you deal with huge codebases, like monorepos
Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
151–160 of 532 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#152Obs studio. I record myself while coding anything. I pretend to be a bigshot coding streaming sensation (even if its just for me). Its fun as well as very helpful in so many ways. 1. It helps me stay focus on the task at hand. One recording for each task 2. It lets me practice how to articulate stuffs. Its like blogging but ephemeral (because i wont upload this) 3. It helps me get motivated. Cant let my "thousands" o…
I don't have anything to add but I feel like a simple upvote does not do this idea justice - that's so awesome, I have to try it!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#153try to be 1% better as frequently as possible. (James Clear says daily, but even monthly will pay off a lot over a career)
For any self improvement where it's equally difficult, and it's only the changing cost, do your best to change immediately.
For example it's basically identical to write, but the latter is much much more valuable code. Identical effort, more value.
log.Printf("thang blew up: %v", err)
// vs
logrus.WithError(err).Error("thang blew up")
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#154KEEP 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 do the same, using the Zettelkasten method. I've found it very useful. I write many small notes as markdown files and link them together, storing them in a git repository. I wrote a bit about Zettelkästen (and the practices I follow), in case others find it useful: https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m...
That’s amazing!
So the linkages for the visualizations are derived from the notes themselves?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#155Obs studio. I record myself while coding anything. I pretend to be a bigshot coding streaming sensation (even if its just for me). Its fun as well as very helpful in so many ways. 1. It helps me stay focus on the task at hand. One recording for each task 2. It lets me practice how to articulate stuffs. Its like blogging but ephemeral (because i wont upload this) 3. It helps me get motivated. Cant let my "thousands" o…
I loved this idea. Can you share your Obs defaults/workflow for this? By example, I work 8hs per day, how much space all this audio/video recording will take? What video/resolution/etc? Thank you!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#156Probably an unpopular opinion but... Write your own text editor.
I've been working on my own (https://github.com/alefore/edge) as a side project and using it exclusively for about six years. I don't expect it to be very usable by other people (it's very customized for my workflows, I suppose; e.g., it's mostly useful for writing C++ and Markdown files) but, because I know it inside out (and I've invested in making it easy to customize through its extension language), it's very easy for me to adjust it to behave exactly the way I want it, which allows me to lower the friction for any operations I care about (and it abides very exactly to my principles/expectations for how an editor should behave; e.g. never block the main thread/UI while executing some operation such as opening a file). Because I don't have to use but a small set of computers directly (mostly my laptop and my workstation), this works well enough.
I don't know if overall it'll save me more time than it has taken me to implement it, but I do believe it allows me to move significantly faster than if I still used Vim or Emacs (or than most of my team mates), especially because it allows me to operate at a higher semantic level than otherwise, eliminating distractions from lower level details.
... and, I guess, it has been a lot of fun to implement it (and I've probably learned a bunch). I think it has played a role for me similar to that videogames have played for some of my friends (e.g., this weekend's challenge may be to generate visualizations for the logs I keep for every interaction I have with each file I've edited; implementing stuff like that feels similar to how in the past I felt about making progress in some videogames).
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#157I just started at Stripe last year, and I found myself perform many mechanical tasks like: * Converting seconds-from-epoch to a human readable date * Select an id and pull info about it At first, I tried to perform these mechanical tasks with some crazy shortcuts. But remembering shortcuts for every little flow is heavy. Eventually, I've built a programmable tooltip on Mac OS X for these mechanical tasks. I'd love fo…
Very cool idea! I can immediately thing of like 5 things I could use this for.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#158I just started at Stripe last year, and I found myself perform many mechanical tasks like: * Converting seconds-from-epoch to a human readable date * Select an id and pull info about it At first, I tried to perform these mechanical tasks with some crazy shortcuts. But remembering shortcuts for every little flow is heavy. Eventually, I've built a programmable tooltip on Mac OS X for these mechanical tasks. I'd love fo…
Very cool idea! I can immediately thing of like 5 things I could use this for.
Thank you! Please don't hesitate to open GitHub issues if you have suggestions to make your workflows more convenient.
Just curious: what are the workflows you plan to use Tip for?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#159Learn 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?
What's the value add of touch typing? I tried it for a bit, but it seemed like a waste. I can consistently do ~90-100 WPM on https://www.livechat.com/typing-speed-test/#/ with very few mistakes just typing with 3 fingers on my left hand and 2 on my right. Feels like input speed is one of the least important parts of coding. Did one test for this comment. https://imgur.com/a/GISaU6n
I was hoping your image would be a video of you showing that you're actually two coffee-crazed squirrels.
You must know that average touch typing speed is 40 wpm, professional is 75 wpm, therefore you have nothing to gain by optimizing further. Especially since bragging about doing it the hard way lets you seem like you'd be even faster if you tried.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#160KEEP 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 use a combination of WorkFlowy and Notion for note-taking. WorkFlowy serves as my daily quick jotting medium. Notion I spend more time crafting and organizing, so that knowledge is more discoverable. Do you ever find yourself going through these ISO-dated notes? I would image re-finding something is difficult?