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Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#42Other people have already gave many examples, but they can all be summarised as "shorten the feedback loop".
CI/CD shortens how long it takes to see your code running in a production-like environment.
A good type system and a good test suite help catch bugs before the program is actually run.
Short compile times (or an interpreter), hot code reloading, a good debugger, all help to see the impact of your changes faster. Even autocompletion or an efficient editor like Vim relate to getting your code done and running faster.
It all comes down to fast feedback. Reducing friction is also nice, e.g. PHP is really easy to get started, but not as important as the fast feedback IMO.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#431. Continuous delivery.
2. Git, mercurial, bazaar. Dvcs.
3. Code formatters, static analysis
4. Cloud services. No talking to sales to get another server.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#44I would say it's not so much about improving the efficiency of the team, but rather removing things that reduce the efficiency of the team, of which there are many. For me it's Scrum. Every two weeks we have a full-day meeting with the entire team. In addition, every Thursday and Friday we have a meeting mid-morning of "analysis" (whole team) which means I can't get anything significant done beforehand, nor afterward…
That’s not strictly speaking scrum’s fault. The analysis meetings are not part of it, and the full-day biweekly meeting seems excessive - demo and planning when closing a sprint should be at most half a day. It sounds like the team is too big if you’re using so much time in meetings - takes a long time for everyone to do their demos and then still longer to plan the next sprint (too-big team = “too much capacity” - so planning all the work takes too long). Maybe split into two teams and have them pick work from the backlog independently, or have two backlogs depending on each sub team’s strengths.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#45Long, self-documenting variable names.
Because someone else will eventually have to debug or rework your code. And that might even be you, six months from now after you've forgotten everything.
It's relatively cheap and cross platform compatible.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#46- Automated testing running on each PR - Having a dedicated Quality team - Ensuring everyone is on the same page, from the lowest level (coding standards) to mid level (discussing tasks before implementing them) to meta level (principles for development, building culture) - Rewarding bold moves and experiments, giving people freedom to be creative - Leveraging the wisdom of the Open Source community
The 2nd and 3rd points seem somewhat at odds? How do you balance team discussion with encouraging individuals to experiment and push the boat forward?
The important part for me is to make sure everyone understands _what_ needs to get done, not necessarily prescribe _how_ to do it.
But I agree it can be fuzzy. Generally I want folks to be aligned and super clear on what we're trying to do, because if everyone understands it differently, we're all pulling in different directions.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#47PHP For all the hate PHP gets, a massive positive of it is entire classes of development friction that just doesn’t exist for it. COMPILE: Slow compile times, nope - it’s interrupted & you can run the code instantly. DEVELOPMENT: Confusing and complex development tooling or middleware, nope - just SFTP a single file to your webroot. So the language / environment you pick to develop in can has massive impact on produc…
Isn't it the same for Python?
Deploying changes to a server with python tends to be more involved than just plonking a file via ftp. Even best-case, you usually have to restart a process or something (gunicorn).
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#48PHP For all the hate PHP gets, a massive positive of it is entire classes of development friction that just doesn’t exist for it. COMPILE: Slow compile times, nope - it’s interrupted & you can run the code instantly. DEVELOPMENT: Confusing and complex development tooling or middleware, nope - just SFTP a single file to your webroot. So the language / environment you pick to develop in can has massive impact on produc…
100% THIS! There is a reason so many products and platforms - like WordPress, which powers so many blogs on the internet - were built leveraging PHP: productivity/getting stuff done! I would add that i'm not only implying that conventional developers gain productivity...but that also that PHP empowered - yes empowered - folks who may not be "real" developers, and gave them a tool/platform to participate on the produc…
There’s also a reason a ton of those applications built on php are terrible to use and get crushed under their own weight.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#49PHP For all the hate PHP gets, a massive positive of it is entire classes of development friction that just doesn’t exist for it. COMPILE: Slow compile times, nope - it’s interrupted & you can run the code instantly. DEVELOPMENT: Confusing and complex development tooling or middleware, nope - just SFTP a single file to your webroot. So the language / environment you pick to develop in can has massive impact on produc…
Isn't it the same for Python?
In the sense that subsequent requests will see the changed code, yes (unless byte code cache is involved).
OP is likely referring to the mod_php convention of directly executing PHP scripts by filename/URL while Python/WSGI needs a single entry point. Your directory structure becomes your routing logic.
Re: Ask HN: What technologies greatly improve the efficiency of development?
#50Decoupling
Agreed. and unit tests can help force decoupling.