Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips? • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by erik_seaberg » Sat, May 09, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #236

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…

One of my favorite bash tricks is that I have this alias in my bashrc file: function goto { cd -P ~/.links/"$1"; } And then in the `.links` folder I have symbolic links to directories I need to go to often. Then getting to a frequently used directory is just a `goto X` away.

Cool. How does that compare with setting CDPATH?

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

#272

Post by medecau » Sat, May 09, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

jgable wrote: post #269

Test driven development for my embedded systems work. I’ll never go back.

I got some code going on using pytest and pyserial exactly for this.

Tell us more!

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

#273

Post by ggregoire » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:00 AM UTC

city41 wrote: post #262

ggregoire wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The investment you have to make to really grok static typing is quite large. It took about 2 years for me to be really comfortable in TS. That sounds a bit exaggerated from my experience. If anyone interested in TS got discouraged reading your comment, it took between like 2 days and 2 weeks for my team to be really comfortable in TS. If you already know JavaScript and if you already have some experience with stati…

Maybe my choice of the word "comfortable" was incorrect (although I would say "grok" was a spot on word choice in this context). It took me a good while to get the point where no matter what I encounter in TS, I feel pretty confident I can arrive at understanding it. The type system is very powerful and there are some deep rabbit holes you can find yourself in. For example, if you can follow this blog post after only…

Interesting article. :)

And there is a useful library linked at the end: https://github.com/pirix-gh/ts-toolbelt.

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

#274

Post by statictype » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

vatotemking wrote: post #266

Use procrastination against itself. So basically, when procrastinating, we tend to justify our inactions: just 1 more minute on Twitter, just one last scroll on my newfeed, lemme just check this subreddit really quick. With reverse procrastination, you trick your brain into doing your intended task: Ok lemme just open Visual Studio Code and edit this one file then im good, I'll just change this one line of code, I'll…

Yeah, I tried that. Didn't work for me. I'm too clever for my own tricks.

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

#275

Post by yrral » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

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…

This is really cool. I had a similar idea a couple of years ago to implement something similar to this using the three finger single tap command on the trackpad that currently brings up dictionary/siri knowledge/wikipedia etc. I see you have 4-finger tap implemented with an additional app which is really cool and probably better than the 3-finger native OS way since you can highlight/copy as well as build your own menu.

Thank you for this!

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

#276

Post by wilgertvelinga » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

Shorten your feedback loop by using a continuous unit test or code runner. For JavaScript and it's variants I use WallabyJS (unit tests) and QuokkaJS (code). For C# there's nCrunch. For Python there's PyCrunch. And for Java and it's variants you can find InfinitTest

Here's a video by myself showing the JavaScript tools: https://youtu.be/MpFImvZrbDY

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

#277

Post by un_montagnard » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

Know your IDE inside out. Not only the features, but also the keyboard shortcuts.

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

#278

Post by kevindeasis » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

There are a lot of advice out there and looking for advice that you dont need and mental models that you dont need can be a huge waste of time. Know the problem you have at hand, and find out what people are doing to solve it, dont look for answers for problems you don't have.

Reading non-fictional books can be a waste of time. IE: I've read over 40 non-fiction books in 365 because I enjoy them. This approach is not time effective because you can usually put the wisdom and knowledge of one book in 1 paragraph

Know your context and know if those advice apply to you

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

#279

Post by georgewsinger » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

Programming in VR Desktop: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula (see the README for a link to a video of it in action).

This allows you to (i) distribute your work tasks intuitively across space; (ii) completely zap out all distractions within a VR headset; (iii) completely eliminate the mouse and work 100% on a keyboard (VR Desktop allows you to click and browse with eye gaze).

It takes a bit of practice to learn the keyboard shorcuts (spawning terminals, moving windows, etc with keyboard shortcuts), but once you learn it, it can feel very immersive/productive.

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

#280

Post by tanin » Sat, May 09, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

yrral wrote: post #275

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…

This is really cool. I had a similar idea a couple of years ago to implement something similar to this using the three finger single tap command on the trackpad that currently brings up dictionary/siri knowledge/wikipedia etc. I see you have 4-finger tap implemented with an additional app which is really cool and probably better than the 3-finger native OS way since you can highlight/copy as well as build your own me…

Yes, I'm still working on the mouse/trackpad configuration app, which will make Tip usage really convenient.

Please leave a comment on this issue: https://github.com/tanin47/tip/issues/28

I'll notify you when the app is released to private beta.

Current progress: I'm building the setting UI for configuring mouse button and trackpad.