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Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#301

Post by BalsterNeb »

mthoms wrote: post #282
superasn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I would agree with that. If you make websites there is just nothing better than PHPStorm. It is one of the program that just works and makes your life a hell easier. Also a huge shoutout to 'lazyone' on SO for always answering my questions. It's one of the rare companies that actually understand what you're saying instead of just pasting canned replies. BTW I'm not affiliated with them but they're having a 50% d…

Hmmm, I'm not seeing the discount pricing you speak of.

Looks like it’s specific to PhpStorm, and not any other JetBrain products.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#302

Post by superasn »

mthoms wrote: post #282
superasn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I would agree with that. If you make websites there is just nothing better than PHPStorm. It is one of the program that just works and makes your life a hell easier. Also a huge shoutout to 'lazyone' on SO for always answering my questions. It's one of the rare companies that actually understand what you're saying instead of just pasting canned replies. BTW I'm not affiliated with them but they're having a 50% d…

Hmmm, I'm not seeing the discount pricing you speak of.

I guess it's only for PHPStorm and ending it about 14 hours from now

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/php-25/

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#303

Post by mxschumacher »

typenil wrote: post #55

Most of my productivity gains these days has come from aligning myself and my workstation. - i3wm ( https://i3wm.org/ ) - particularly getting comfortable editing the .i3/config. It's the most significant productivity change I've had since switching to Linux from Windows. To get into it, I highly recommend this 3-part video series from Code Cast: https://youtu.be/j1I63wGcvU4 - yadm ( https://yadm.io/ ) - a dotfile ma…

fast switching between workspaces + efficient use of screen real estate + great hotkeys make i3 truly great, I have used it for many years and don't want to miss its minimalism

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#304

Post by austincheney »

JSLint hands down. There is a lot of sloppiness in JavaScript and that tool’s motto is: JSLint will hurt your feelings.

The idea was a heavily opinionated code validation tool striving to make code subjectively cleaner and clearer for strangers to read. Many people stopped using it because they claimed it was too opinionated, even though every other super popular/trendy JavaScript tool claims to be just as opinionated.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#305

Post by mxschumacher »

Jeaye wrote: post #22

- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…

for those wanting to brush up on their regex skills, here's a nice tutorial:

https://regexone.com/

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#306

Post by mxschumacher »

benjohnson wrote: post #47

Putting this in my hosts file helped me maintain my focus. 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reddit.com 127.0.0.1 facebook.com

for good measure, here are 83k additional domains:

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#307

Post by kortex »

Immutable infrastructure / functional programming / crash-only code. In conjunction with lots of docker, ansible, studying FP, and trying to adopt these principles in all my main languages (python, go, c, c++, bash)

Those 3 ideas all kind of mushed together radically changed my overall approach to development. What do they all have in common? Avoiding complex state.

State is hard to reason about. Each piece of state that can interact introduces combinatorially-growing complexity.

Crash-only code may seem like the odd one out but think about it: if your program dying at literally any point has the potential for data corruption, you probably have some sort of issue with state management.

I guess you could call it anarchy coding, because it tries to completely eliminate state ;)

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#309

Post by Bnshsysjab »

hashhar wrote: post #285
srich36 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do use i3 for more than L/R splits with stacking etc. the largest benefit I get from it is workspace management. I use i3 with polybar and have dedicated workspace icons (web browser, terminal, editor, to-do, email, music, etc) for quick navigation between different applications. Over time I’ve built up muscle memory (i.e $Mod+3 will bring me to my editor) that has significantly sped up my development process…

I can echo this! This is exactly how I feel too - the muscle memory around workspace management and the scratch windows (floating windows that you can toggle in/out of visibility based on a single keystroke) are the real boosters for me rather than splits. Splits are useful but the most common use I've seen myself do is to have a browser and a terminal / editor in splits.

> T he scratch windows (floating windows that you can toggle in/out of visibility based on a single keystroke

Us the toggle an i3 concept? I’m interested in it, can you give me the function name so I can look up doco? :)

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#310

Post by boogies »

nickysielicki wrote: post #236
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: i3wm I installed it a couple years ago, went whole hog, down the rabbit hole, but realized a couple of things. 1. I rarely ever use anything more than a simple L/R split. 2. When I do use something more complex, it's almost always in the terminal, in which case why not use tmux? These days I'm back to using gnome because ubuntu switched to it over unity (which had a weird multitouch bug that drove me crazy). What…

I agree wholeheartedly. Especially when most of the work I do is on a remote server anyway, so I'm already in tmux. I still use i3wm on older laptops just for the battery life gains, but 95% of what I do is Firefox + Terminal emulator, and alt-tab is just as fast. My main workstation is just gnome and it's fine. (Sidenote: is there any sort of linux libvte-based terminal emulator that has tmux integration a-la iTerm2…

Re. Sidenote: It doesn't look like there are many terminal emulators with tmux built in¹, but you can bind a keyboard shortcut to `xterm -e tmux attach'. (rxvt[-unicode] and st also support the -e flag, to run a given command instead of the default shell).

1: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/189805/what-termina...

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