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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?

#311

Post by fxtentacle »

Purchase a good IDE.

It'll provide similar benefits as writing your own text editor (which was suggested here).

It can also provide type hints and type checks for dynamically typed languages, thereby making them more like statically typed languages (also suggested in here).

Plus a good IDE will speed up searching as well as index the source code to make things click-able, thereby making large code bases or dependencies easier to navigate (also suggested in here).

So basically you can get a large chunk of the improvements that others have suggested in this thread simply by purchasing a good IDE :)

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

#312

Post by louiskottmann »

The single biggest productivity boost is when I realized over 90% of my time is spent in Firefox+Terminal+Emacs.

Alt-tab drove me nuts so I bind F2/F3/F4 to a script that will cycle through instances of these 3 programs.

F2 is terminal, F2 again is next terminal, etc.

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

#313

Post by elliotec »

afc wrote: post #142
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 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...

I love this. I've been wanting something just like this. Thank you!

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

#314

Post by abridgett »

Share more. Whilst it might seem appealing to be "the one person" who can do something, it stops you moving on to new things. I've seen so many people go from "the guru" to "the bottleneck" because they've never done this. Sometimes due to "holding onto power" sometimes lack of time or motivations. Docs and explanations help the author to move onto new projects and new developers to pickup the old projects - a win/win.

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

#316

Post by thoughtstile »

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…

Alternatively, if you don't care about having an audience, you can just do private livestreams directly to YouTube via OBS. After your stream is concluded, it saves the livestream as a VOD. With this method, you don't have to worry about storing large video files when recording yourself.

Also, because it's YouTube, you inherit all of the benefits YouTube provides. You get the added benefit of having closed captioning for your videos after processing. You can watch through your recordings at 2x speed. And of course, you can share VODs to other people if you ever need to.

I've been treating YouTube as a personalized streaming website with free, unlimited storage.

If you do end up doing this, make sure to avoid any copyrighted content (Netflix, official music, etc.), otherwise YouTube will copyright strike your channel.

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

#317

Post by noisy_boy »

Started my personal wiki using dokuwiki. I sync it between my Ubuntu laptop and Android phone using Syncthing (on the phone I use Nginx on Termux to serve the pages). Very satisfying to have my notes available everywhere without having to share them with cloud etc (I already backup everything locally and on Backblaze so they are safe anyway).

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

#318

Post by noisy_boy »

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…

$_ will do the same thing in bash as in "ls thing" and then "vim $_" (but only works for arguments from the last command)

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

#319

Post by [deleted] »

ra7 wrote: post #87
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 want to take notes everyday, but I keep getting bogged down by how to organize those notes so I can "look back" efficiently. Essentially, I want to avoid taking so much notes that I'm reluctant to search for something because I haven't organized it well. Do you think the ISO date name method is working well for you?

[deleted]
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