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

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

#161

Post by afc »

koolba wrote: post #154
afc wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Aww, thank you!

Yeah, that entire article is generated from the set of notes. There's one note for each subsection (down to the finest level of granularity) and it just extracts the article directly based on the links. I described this in a set of notes that end up here: https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/zettelkasten.m...

The images (e.g., distribution of back links per file, semilattice view, etc.) are also just generated programmatically from the repository of notes.

The code that extract it is here: https://github.com/alefore/edge/blob/master/rc/editor_comman... (function zke, which receives the output path, the path to the initial note, and a string listing space separated paths of notes to ignore).

Here's another example of an article generated from my notes (this is way longer and is very incomplete, and probably contains a bunch of mistakes, but you may find it interesting as an example): https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/software-corre...

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

#162

Post by kanyethegreat »

chrsstrm wrote: post #111
chadlavi wrote: post #50

KEEP 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…

The first thing I do for every project is set up a development blog. Hugo + a nice free theme + Gitlab Pages + Netlify CMS. Everything is contained in Gitlab and I can keep the Pages site private and only accessible by members of the repo. It is less of a daily log and more exploring "issues" - basically anything I took time to research and figure out. I'm very adamant about recording details like dates, version numb…

I love this. I have a grouping of pages in Notion for tech notes. But I really like the idea of scoping it to a project. I like that you don't need a local repo. I'll have to experiment with this. Have you automated anything for it? And do you have any patterns you use (eg. organizing the information, etc). Thanks!

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

#163

Post by kanyethegreat »

lukifer wrote: post #121

I can't say enough good things about a multiple clipboard manager. Not only is it useful to copy/paste multiple items in sequence, but it's a game changer to be able to quickly retrieve a code snippet, or URL, or CLI command you used recently; and/or, to trivially stash one just in case you'll want it later. (Primary downside: using a computer without multiple clipboards feels broken. What do you mean it "forgot" the…

Nice! I've been looking for something like this. Do you use tmux? I wonder how it works with tmux copy mode... Semi-related to this, I wish there was a way to visualize your undo/redo tree. I hate that if I want to undo a change I made 10 changes ago, I can't (at least, I don't know how to). Something like a jump list in vim.

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

#164

Post by deeg »

I consider scripts to be functional documentation, so I write a lot of them, usually shell scripts but Ruby and Python, too. Any task that I might want to perform again, or tasks for someone else, gets a script if possible. All of my repos have a /scripts directory.

It can take some work to write and debug but in the end when it's working you know you have correct "documentation". Text and wiki documentation may look right but you can't be sure. Just today someone on my team was trying to create a particular build on Jenkins but was using the wrong build parameters, which were copied from wiki; the previous owner of the wiki had neglected a few changes. But the script worked!

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

#165

Post by H8crilA »

From my experience - multiple desktops, especially when having multiple monitors (and yes, you should probably get a second monitor).

If you don't use desktop switching: the basic idea is to have one desktop per task/bug/project. Lets you context-switch in a very organized manner.

If you're using them, good, but you may be surprised how many people don't!

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

#166

Post by kanyethegreat »

simonw wrote: post #21

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.

Absolutely! I've come to the same realization. Just haven't figured out my effective documentation rules. Difficult to experiment with what works when the feedback loop is on the same magnitude of how long it takes you to forget (eg. 6 months). Best proxy I can come up with is "how can I communicate this to someone who has no context? What would they want to know?"

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

#167

Post by themodelplumber »

jokab wrote: post #81

Obs 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…

That's a great idea. I have done this with vlogs/podcasting and even blogging (created several fake blogs over the years, even in a journal on paper), but never while coding or otherwise doing stuff on the screen. Good stuff.

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

#168

Post by kanyethegreat »

Groxx wrote: post #119

Set up a "scratchpad" repo for small experiments / learning, and phrase your learning as tests. Not only does it get you practice writing code, you have evidence that what you think is actually true . And/or you can demonstrate it's not, when you learn otherwise. And if you push it somewhere, you can link people to it trivially (great for questions / teaching / bug reports). It's pretty much guaranteed to be faster t…

Love this idea! I generally just have scratch files in whatever codebase I'm working on, but I like the idea of having a centralized place to keep these. Any chance yours is public? I'd love to see an example of how you organized the repo, what type of stuff your testing, any boilerplate setup/tooling you used to make it more effective (mocking library to stub out things like network calls or complex objects, test runners, etc)

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

#169

Post by superasn »

Build a snippet library.

You know those tiny useful functions to "parse any date into mysql friendly format", "check if string is a email or url", etc.

I have now hundreds of such functions in two huge files for the languages I work in most and it saves me a ton of time not having to reinvent the wheel or searching stackoverflow everytime.

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