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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?

#331

Post by DmitryOlshansky »

My biggest boosters were:

- learning more then a few basic hot keys for zsh (things like ctrl-k, ctrl-r and beyond)

- mastering tiling window manager, today I can switch, compose, mix and match windows in a blink of any eye - it used to take seconds

- switch to minimal OS setup, tile WM, your basic terminal tool suit, browser + the few apps you actually need (saves you trouble configuring all of that extra crap + updating it daily)

- find time to read MAN on every program you use daily, you will find lots of hidden gems in there

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

#332

Post by jokab »

thoughtstile wrote: post #316
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…

I also considered this in the past but sometimes, I slip into procrastination mode unintentionally and might check my bank account (or pornhub) once in a while. So thinking my video is uploaded to somebody else's computer gives me the shivers.

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

#333

Post by bbarn »

This is a bit of a departure from the question you asked, but I'm always amazed how much people tend to hyper-tune their dev environments, when in reality, most of my time is spent thinking how not to write code. I get just as much work done on a completely vanilla macbook with VS code installed on it as my editor-obsessed peers with obsessively optimized setups can.

How much actual code are you writing? I'd be really concerned with myself if I am putting out so much code that I need to be concerned with my text input speed.

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

#334

Post by jokab »

w1nter wrote: post #293

I switch between commonly used apps with a single shortcut (e.g. ⌥E opens VSCode, ⌥D opens Chrome). Details http://frantic.im/macos-app-shortcuts I use a simple TODO file for side projects https://blog.frantic.im/all/todo-file-for-personal-projects/

on Windows I use Win+1 (windows terminal or conemu), Win+2 VS 2019, Win+3 VSCode, etc

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

#335

Post by kqr »

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…

> - Your eyes are the only broadband connection into the brain, and they have millenia of pattern recognition training built into them.

This is also true of your ears. If you can find a way to convert what's going on into sound, you can very accurately pick up inconsistencies by ear.

(This is why you sometimes want to bring a stethoscope into the machine room.)

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

#336

Post by iveqy »

Not a tool as you asked for but...

My tip is to change the requirements. Requirements are often poorly written and often contain a suggested implementation. Try to find the real problem, talk to your stakeholders and alter the requirements to find the easiest implementation.

I've saved months of work several times by doing this.

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

#337

Post by mjul »

Parazitull wrote: post #308
kortex wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TL,DR: Try F# or other "impure" ML languages if you want the security of types but you don't like actually typing the types. I also used to love js / php because because I thought types make the code unnecessarily verbose. After some pet projects with a strongly typed lang (c#) I realized the peace of mind that using types gives. But I still maintain my opinion that types make the code too verbose. But then I saw the…

For the good parts, I would add the effortless type declarations to overcome “Primitive Obsession”, the immensely useful pattern matching to ensure you cover all edge cases and what I really found to be the killer feature: Type Providers to enable typed data wrangling in just a few lines.

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

#338

Post by xenihn »

DmitryOlshansky wrote: post #331

My biggest boosters were: - learning more then a few basic hot keys for zsh (things like ctrl-k, ctrl-r and beyond) - mastering tiling window manager, today I can switch, compose, mix and match windows in a blink of any eye - it used to take seconds - switch to minimal OS setup, tile WM, your basic terminal tool suit, browser + the few apps you actually need (saves you trouble configuring all of that extra crap + upd…

Which tiling window manager do you use?

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

#339

Post by xenihn »

andoma wrote: post #137
nemoniac wrote: post #66

1. Learn how to touch type so you never again look down. 2. Learn emacs. 3. Learn how to use emacs in a tight code and test loop. Now you are invincible.

> 3. Learn how to use emacs in a tight code and test loop. Came here to say this. Having a build delay for an average incremental change (edit a single file / compilation unit) be less than 2 seconds is extremely important for my productivity. Whenever I happen to do mobile development (this goes for both Xcode and Android Studio), having to wait 5+ seconds for the app to launch makes me lose focus.

Do you have a link to a guide or anything that would let me replicate your setup for Xcode? This is definitely something I could really use right now.

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

#340

Post by myle »

Teminator.

I see many people suggest tmux, but I have not seen suggestions for my favorite terminal emulator.

Ctrl+Shift+E for vErtical split Ctrl+Shift+O for horizontal

This is a killer feature. It is also much better than tmux because scrolling up is naturally supported.

I always keep an instance of Teminator running full screen on one monitor and whenever I need another terminal, I just split the screen, or go to the relevant already open post of the screen.

Having a visual overview of all instances of very helpful and much better than using tabs.

The other killer feature in bash is Ctrl+r.

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