131–140 of 818 posts
Not sure if this is the kind of thing you had in mind, but... `clang-format` saves a non-trivial chunk of time during code reviews, eliding a very banal topic.
And enforcing those formatters and linters cuts the time I spend reviewing other people's code by at least 50% because I know those issues have been dealt with.
- Git push to deploy
- Scaling dynos
- Turning add-ons on/off
- Managed PG (backups, rollback, copies)
I can't imagine how much time I would have had to invest in building my first few apps without Heroku. Had a similar experience with Google AppEngine in ~2009; I barely knew how to code and I was able to charge a customer for the first time ever for a working service.
Google & stackoverflow Prior to this everything was based out of tech manuals, now I can find good information fast, and memorize pointless trivia far less.
Now, Google is heavily polluted with SEO garbage, junior-level blog posts churned out by what must be student assignments to "write a blog post about this week's programming assignment", and the truly horrible data scraping sites like xspdf or whatever. General web search is increasingly poor.
And Stackoverflow was great for a long time. Now it is mostly outdated (which usually means incorrect) Q/A data. Worse, the old information that should be retired actually blocks new questions with current answers because of the aggressive system of trying to prevent "duplicate" questions. It's not a duplicate question if there's an 8+ year (or even 3+ year!) gap between the date of the original and the date of the new one. Quite often, even if the original question is close enough to current needs, the answers are very unlikely to be correct now.
+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…
Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…
It's very likely a smart business decision, but I wish Steam had a re-sell market. Even just having only a single possible sale, I think would help sort the crap from the gold. There'd be one more opportunity for profit AND people could buy games for cheap. Sure, there's an opportunity to copy games before you sell them, but I think there's ways to fix that. Sell for steam-credit only maybe? and there's plenty of opp…
When I started as a developer the internet wasn't there. If you wanted a new library or tool you had to go to a shop and buy the floppy disks (or mailorder). If you wanted docs you used the man pages or had to buy the book, probably the bookstore would order it for you. Its hard to imagine now.
Java vs. the 90s C/C++ standards. Not having to deal with memory management made it so much easier to write applications. I'm guessing SQL was a 10x innovation at least when it came out, too.
+1 for this. Java gets shade from the hipsters these days, but it's almost impossible to overstate what a revolution it was for software engineering.
If you don't know COBOL, it was a revolution compared to programming in Assembler. It's hard to overstate how big an improvement it was for productivity.