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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?

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hence my love for ReasonML / OCaml with the Bucklescript compiler.

Do you use ReasonML on the backend as well? Or just something like ReasonReact? I've been interested in Reason and still wondering the best way to work it into my NodeJS/React/Typescript stack.

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

#344

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…

The first thing I do for every project is set up a development blog. Hugo + a nice free theme + Gitlab Pages + Netlify CMS. Everything is contained in Gitlab and I can keep the Pages site private and only accessible by members of the repo. It is less of a daily log and more exploring "issues" - basically anything I took time to research and figure out. I'm very adamant about recording details like dates, version numb…

I tried to do this for my last project but ended up spending too much time making the blog and didn't get around to properly starting the project! Maybe instead of rolling my own site from scratch I'll use Hugo.

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

#345
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…

Just curious but have you tried Hegel (https://hegel.js.org/)?

I've only just started playing with it but it already feels superior to Typescript (for my needs)

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

#346

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 dependenci…

For a number of years I used the jetbrains IDE's (at alternating times I used phpstorm, webstorm and intellij), commonly perceived as best in class. Then I switched employers to a place that had standardized on VS code, so I moved over as well.

I have to say that while it was hard to get used to in the beginning, it is surprising how good VS code is. I get 80% of the featureset of jetbrains' products, for free. Specifically, all of the features you mentioned VS code does just as well when doing web dev.

The only thing I'm missing is the framework-specific automation helping you easily set up projects, builds, unit tests, and so on. VS code can automate those things, but there is more googling involved.

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

#347
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One thing you can try: actually stop after those 5 push-ups. Actually stop after editing that line of the code. The idea is that I need to build tolerance for that task. If you keep at it, those 5 push-ups will become so easy that you will feel compelled to do more. If it's not working, then there's another reason behind the resistance. Maybe what you're trying to do feels pointless. Try to notice your feelings and i…

Or just make the task smaller and smaller. Can’t finish 5? Do 1! Too much? Just get on the floor and hold the position. This strategy can’t fail, as you can always reduce your goal (and next time have to reduce it less)

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

#349

Learn to touch-type properly. I'm not a shit hot typist or anything, but it does make hours on a keyboard more pleasant. And (hate me) I do judge other devs on it. If someone can't be bothered to invest a few tens of hours on such a key productivity enhancement then what does that say?

What's the value add of touch typing? I tried it for a bit, but it seemed like a waste. I can consistently do ~90-100 WPM on https://www.livechat.com/typing-speed-test/#/ with very few mistakes just typing with 3 fingers on my left hand and 2 on my right. Feels like input speed is one of the least important parts of coding. Did one test for this comment. https://imgur.com/a/GISaU6n

The biggest benefit in my view is not typing speed but keeping your eyes on what you're typing instead of on the keyboard. You catch more mistakes that way. If you're already keeping your eyes on the screen, you've got most of the value already.

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

#350

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

Watching you video now, really cool to learn about Quokka, thanks!
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