work expands to fill the time you allow it to fill. thus: timebox
dont let perfect be the enemy of the better
iterate
many many others
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
311–320 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#312Can someone elaborate on how they use reg ex as a productivity boost? Do you use it for text transformation? How do you use it exactly? Do you use it as code itself or as a tool to help you explore/write code? I am a huge fan of Macros, I 100% understand their role in text transformation, but what problem does regex solve? I spend so much time trying to remember the correct syntax, it only ever works for me when solv…
>> Do you use it for text transformation?
Mostly, yes. How often do you search and/or replace and/or extract text? Now imagine doing it while being able to specify patterns instead of just fixed text.
A couple examples:
- find all occurrences of some text only when near some other text, no matter the intervening text;
- transform calls to a routine to calls to another routine, while swapping arguments.
As for other tools, once you know them, you will find ways to use them.
Yes, their syntax can be difficult to remember, but most of the time you are going to use just a few patterns and will learn them by rote memorization. They will become second nature, and indeed I myself am sometimes surprised by the complexity of patterns that I write without thinking about it. Anyway, I recommend that you have handy a plugin for your text editor that highlights matches, to help in troubleshooting buggy regexes when they get convoluted.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#313One thing that I’ve been focusing on lately is “the little things”. Does the interface look nice? Is the font big enough to read 2ft away? How easy is the command to update the software? Have we tested both the backup AND restore workflows? Are they all buttery smooth ? Does everything work the way you’d expect right away, out of the box, by default? The nicer the workflow, the more vanilla the tooling, the more self…
Yes, all this. I apply this mentality mostly to presentation. If the design and code present well, team members are much more likely to contribute in positive ways and help “tend to the garden”.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#314CLIs > GUIs
automate > manual
many many others
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#315All those little bits of knowledge are nice tools and patterns, they're definitely good to have. And if you have curiosity, you will naturally keep learning dozens of those over time. But they are not applicable everywhere, so you should not expect your 8 hour days to turn into 48 minutes because you started using regexes, dynamic programming, and search algorithms everywhere. The unlikable and unhelpful answer, but…
The OP is not about 10x more productive, it is about 10x productivity boosts. Using regexes can easily be 10x faster than manual editing, and property-based tests can easily be written 10x faster than a more or less equivalent battery of tests.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#316All those little bits of knowledge are nice tools and patterns, they're definitely good to have. And if you have curiosity, you will naturally keep learning dozens of those over time. But they are not applicable everywhere, so you should not expect your 8 hour days to turn into 48 minutes because you started using regexes, dynamic programming, and search algorithms everywhere. The unlikable and unhelpful answer, but…
> The harsh reality is that there is no single thing a 1x person can do to become 10x. Any evidence for this? You may say there's no evidence that a 1x person can work up to 10x its performance, but stating it's impossible without evidence lacks merit.
Two answers to this.
The first I sort of already touched on below is that gaining a whole order of magnitude productivity, not just on a single task where a cool pattern applies but on average, is a really big effect size. If your colleagues start completing tasks that should take a month in 3 days, you would definitely notice.
The second order effect is that if we had discovered any method that reliably let an average person gain 10x productivity, it would have generated tremendous profit for companies and spread like wildfire. We haven't seen that, so we should be very suspicious when people claim a single bit of knowledge, method, or pattern is going to improve your performance by 10x.
(The other response, which is also annoying and unsatisfying, is that I'm making the boring claim that there is nothing interesting, so the burden of proof is actually not on me. If someone thinks there exists any intervention that can increase an arbitrary developer's performance by 10x, it's up to them to collect data and reject the null hypothesis)
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who struggles with ADHD and depression, this isn’t always possible . At 38 years old, what I have discovered are ways to make myself valuable to my employer even when I’m not at my peak. The move to a more “architectural” role has been a Godsend for me. It means that I’m a let to serve to some degree in an advisory capacity for others. When I’m not able to enter “flow” with my primary project, I can usuall…
ha, lucky. I have a similar constellation of problems and never found an employer willing to tolerate it long term. I can put large volumes of high quality work for 3-5 weeks at a time followed by 2-4 weeks of a low output slump. I usually get fired on the fourth or fifth cycle, freelance for a while, then try again. Always hoping to find somewhere willing to accept the inconsistency in output but haven't found it ye…
Larger enterprises should tolerate this better.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#318The ability to type 30+ WPM. This is a pretty low bar to cross. About half the people I have worked with when faced with the task of writing a 40 character line of code will do something like find a similar line and copy and paste it, and then change a character or 2, and then go find a 6 character variable that they need to type and instead of just typing the 6 characters, they highlight another copy of the variable…
copy and paste can be a good tool to avoid typos. But I see alot of people who don't know basic keyboard shortcuts or word autocompletion with tab...
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#319Never parse a data file with regex or string functions. Always spend the small extra time to at least write a state machine.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#320I don't think parser combinators or parser generators should be included in a list of productivity multipliers, personally.
Are you implying that they are more work in the end than manually coding a parser? Has that been your experience?