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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?

#211

Post by ken »

imwally wrote: post #101

Emacs key bindings work system-wide on macOS. Having the same keys to navigate no matter what app you’re in is a huge productivity booster.

This is one of the things I love about macOS -- when it works. I really wish they worked better.

Yank works 90% the same, which is close enough to be useful but different enough to be annoying, daily. Repeat count is disabled by default. Transpose is broken in Xcode 10, and I heard Xcode 11 fixed it but one of my Macs can't run (the macOS required for) Xcode 11 so I'm hesitant to upgrade.

And of course if you use Firefox, they've implemented the whole GUI from scratch, and didn't bother with half of those, despite bug reports having been filed literally decades ago.

I get the feeling that Emacs keybindings on the Mac are like map/reduce in Python: it got snuck in version 1 by a fan, and the maintainers since then haven't really understood why it's there or what to do with it. I fully expect it to simply disappear one of these days.

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

#212

Post by kortex »

Ergonomics.

You. Yes, you. Sit up straight. I know you aren't. Take a deep breath, belly breath. Try to let some of the tension out. There, much better :)

Also, TabNine, with a strong IDE and a good type system. The code practically writes itself. You can focus on higher level things.

Testing. Driven. Development. Once you define your goals, it's so much easier to hit them, both cybernetically and psychologically.

tabnine.com/faq

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

#213

Post by tanin »

dlhavema wrote: post #208
tanin wrote: post #140

I 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…

Super cool. Thanks for sharing

Thank you for your comment! Any feedback/suggestion is welcome!

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

#214

Post by redis_mlc »

kortex wrote: post #209
city41 wrote: post #206

The biggest boost in productivity I've had in recent years is switching back to a statically typed language. TypeScript in my case. You can absolutely refactor and change course _so_ much quicker and with virtually no regressions at all. Just the other day we realized a feature I was building didn't handle an important case, and I had to really change the approach. Doing it in a JavaScript would have been dramaticall…

Used to love Python. Now, unless it has type hints, not so much. Used to hate static types, or at least I thought I did. Really, I just hated C++ and Java. Go is Bae, trying to learn some rust. Computers are rigid. The more rigid the lang you talk to them, the less you get bitten. Untyped python, bash, javascript, just not worth it imho.

FYI: Perl has moderately strong typing, as well as forward references, an excellent debugger and probably the most powerful web framework, mojolicious.

If you're unhappy with how loose python and js are, you might find happiness with Perl.

To enable the checking:

use strict;

use diagnostics;

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

#216

Post by drmpeg »

billziss wrote: post #150

I only have only one real tip for you: learn to get in the zone. When I am in the zone I have an intense desire to create a beautiful masterpiece in my chosen art and revel in its elegance and beauty. When I am in the zone outside distractions are eliminated and my mind is fully focused on the task at hand. When I am truly in the zone matters such as health, family, children, work and (when I was younger) even hunger…

For me, listening to music is just another distraction.

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

#217

Post by motor_wolf »

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…

I use org-mode in emacs for this! I usually keep notes on whatever task I am working on, and more general programming notes which I file into tagged headlines for easy reference later.

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

#218

Post by applecrazy »

afc wrote: post #156

Probably 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…

Genuine question: do you think that writing your own editor was a better investment than extensively customizing an existing editor like Vim or Emacs (even going so far as to change the keybinds and UI)?

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

#220

Post by ttty »

Node.js: you can share code between client and server side.

Typescript: you don't need to remember the arguments of a function or return types. Easy to refactor. Just no brainier. I also use it for all my config like webpack config with ts-node or ts-node-dev for auto reload.

Auto format all your code with 1 command. Prettier or lint fix. But that's basic.

Don't ever write global css. Use emotionjs or styled components. Scoped css it's a delight.

If you notice all my tips helps you to reuse the code you write. Therefore write less code, more efficient.

Plan all your stories ahead. Then do one at the time. Then mark it done. Prioritize.

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