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

Post by AnyTimeTraveler » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

louiskottmann wrote: post #312

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.

Post by CodeGlitch » Sat, May 09, 2020, 7:57 AM UTC

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…

Post by deathtrader666 » Sat, May 09, 2020, 8:03 AM UTC

lostmsu wrote: post #246

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…

To be fair, TypeScript's typing is very overloaded with stuff, and is much more complicated than Java or C#'s.

Post by read_if_gay_ » Sat, May 09, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

DaanVanVugt wrote: post #40

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…

For `cp some/long/path/to/foo.txt some/long/path/to/foo2.txt` I always liked brace expansion, for example `cp some/long/path/to/{foo,foo2}.txt` (Though foo{,2}.txt is even shorter)

Post by flukus » Sat, May 09, 2020, 8:20 AM UTC

deeg wrote: post #164

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…

  #my vimrc knows what to do with this
  export VIM_TAGFILES="$PWD/build/tags,$HOME/.local/var/tags/system,$HOME/.local/var/tags/glib-2.0"
  export CFLAGS=' -g -O0 '

  function autobuild {
    (mkdir -p build
      cd build
      while true; do
        make
        make deploy
        inotifywait -qr -e close_write,delete ../cgi ../test ../Makefile.am ../migrate.sql;
    done)
  }

  function watch {
    tail -f build/app.log build/deploy/app.log
  }