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Software devs, how have you sped up your workflow?

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Re: Software devs, how have you sped up your workflow?

#31
post #18

When working in a Typescript/JavaScript stack the test runner WallabyJS has been a great productivity boost, as it constantly runs your tests and gives visual feedback. The debugging facilities are great too. I also recommend TabNine - code intellisense on steroids!

is there anything similar in open source? I am mostly interested in JS/TS

GitHub Copilot is a free alternative to TabNine but access is limited to a small group of users currently.

Not aware of a free alternative to WallabyJS (but I can honestly say its worth it for the day job!)

Re: Software devs, how have you sped up your workflow?

#32
post #25

I do a lot of typescript/JavaScript work. One thing I did recently was spend a day converting several older projects from webpack to esbuild. The build times were cut from 45s average to less than two seconds. This tool is insanely fast at bundling and compiling typescript. I’m just as wary of JavaScript tooling fatigue as the next person, but I truly wish I’d swapped to esbuild sooner. It boggles my mind how much ti…

Do you miss anything from Webpack? My latest project is ts/tsx heavy and I've spent way more time than I'd like just keeping incremental builds under a minute, and it's not doing anything crazy in that time either.

The only thing that tripped me up was the difference between esbuild's `externals` and webpack's `externals`. In webpack you can use the externals config to skip bundling a module and instead get it from another source such as a Node module or, in my case, from a global variable in the browser. In esbuild, an external module is only for the first situation (getting a module from Node), so I was confused about how to get the desired behavior in esbuild. Luckily I found a plugin that does exactly what I want: [0].

Other than that, I'm pretty darn satisfied with what esbuild can do out of the box. I don't use any other plugins except global externals. I don't need a typescript -> javascript plugin like webpack; I don't need a css plugin like webpack; I don't need esnext transpilers or whatever. It's all just built in to esbuild.

Honestly I don't find myself missing anything from webpack. So far esbuild is just better in every way (for myself at least).

[0]: https://github.com/fal-works/esbuild-plugin-global-externals

Re: Software devs, how have you sped up your workflow?

#35
post #29
post #26

Learning the EMacs navigation key combos made getting around the terminal faster. Learning version control made it easier to avoid many, many headaches. Learning the key combos for whatever editor I’m using made it much faster to write, edit and manipulate code. Learning basic bash and Unix programs like grep, awk, find and xargs made it a lot easier to write throwaway scripts to automate things that used to be tedio…

Forgot an important one. Learning how to identify the current bottleneck made it easier to focus on the most important thing.

Any tips for learning this one?

Re: Software devs, how have you sped up your workflow?

#36
post #33

Simply, vim, tmux, and rust. I code in the terminal because its easier for me. Rust because frankly, it's tooling makes being productive easy. Cheers

Is that your workflow professionally for >months?

5-6 years, I would guess
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