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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?

#181

Post by kanyethegreat »

letientai299 wrote: post #7

RTFM (as in Read The Fine Manual). To me, the key for being productivity is understand throughly the "tools" we use: IDE, languages, libraries, framework cli, os, shell,... Read the implementation, the docs, the issue tracker, even the git history if you have time. When I started to learn vim, I tried many popular distribution without understand each of the plugins they included. And I almost gave up learning vim. It…

Love this! I found that the more experienced I became as a dev, the more I gravitated toward the less-removed sources of truth (eg. man pages instead of stack overflow, source code instead of blog articles, etc). Haven't started reading issue trackers, but huge fan of traversing a git history (assuming it's clean and atomic).

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

#182

Post by RobertKerans »

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…

Thank you for posting this. A couple of months ago I built out the design then all the FE code for a prototype app, and recorded the whole process as J was doing it, mainly as an experiment to see where o could improve a few aspects of my designing/developing.

It was all a huge faff as I was just recording short screen captures using QuickTime. But it's definitely the most productive I've been for a very long time, as well as ending up with designs better than anything else I've done for the last year. I did it at work in the office over a few days, so couldn't really talk my way through it (which I think would have improved things still further). I haven't repeated the technique because of the (non programming) effort involved, but Obs seems very good, and something that should push me to try to implement the technique a lot more.

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

#183

Post by kanyethegreat »

dceddia wrote: post #27

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…

Yes, I love this one! I'll check out the widget. Sounds cool! I have the same problem (it's usually changing filenames, so I just use fzf twice, then modify the second filename).

There was one bash feature along the same lines of this. It was like bringing up the previous command in a shell script, so you could modify it freely, then run it. It was useful for long command, I think. Haven't tried learning it though. Just saw a couple wizard colleagues using it, and it seemed cool.

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

#184

Post by kanyethegreat »

bandris wrote: post #90
chadlavi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're talking about only on linux? On a mac `alt .` and `alt /` are mapped to characters ≥ and ÷

Esc-. is more portable. Works on mac too.

Yea, this is what I use.

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

#185

Post by kanyethegreat »

MauranKilom wrote: post #107

- Your eyes are the only broadband connection into the brain, and they have millenia of pattern recognition training built into them. When solving problems like debugging, refactoring or data preparation, consider arranging information in a way that takes advantage of this. When it's in the right shape, irregularities or patterns will often just jump at you. - Relatedly, your eyes are also extremely well-adapted to d…

I spent a short time trying to find a pretty diff tool, but couldn't really find one to my liking. So just ended up using a bash function that did some decorating on the diff output.

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

#187

Post by kanyethegreat »

bhaprayan wrote: post #30

There's many tools I've picked up over the years (sometimes on as needed basis, sometimes just for fun). The latter has been way more rewarding though in retrospect :) Instead of enumerating all of them, I think this course page does a great job of collating them by topic: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

This is awesome. I remember stumbling upon it at some point, but totally forgot about it! Gonna definitely check it out.

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

#188

Post by lostintangent »

Whenever I onboard to a new codebase, or try to learn more about an open-source project, I typically create personal notes that outline the structure and high-level “markers” that I want to remember and easily reference later.

Unfortunately those notes are disconnected from the codebase itself, and therefore, not as immersive/rich as I wanted them to be. So I created a tool that allows me to annotate codebases with my own walkthroughs/breadcrumbs/ToCs and then play them back at any time, directly within my editor. This workflow has provided a pretty nice productivity boost for me thus far, and has the benefit of enabling me to share these walkthroughs with others as well: https://github.com/vsls-contrib/codetour.

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

#189

Post by kanyethegreat »

llarsson wrote: post #18
lukaszkorecki wrote: post #2

C-r for interactive history search

Not just that. Add this to you inputrc: "\e[A": history-search-backward "\e[B": history-search-forward Now up and down arrows will search your history with whatever you already have typed at the prompt. Re-running a command often? Probably just have to type its first letter and hit up arrow once or twice.

I like fzf for command history search. Ctrl-r, then fuzzy search the command, arrow up and down. Nirvana
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