I feel like this is really obvious, but writing tests for everything, you're not necessarily saving time right now, but it is an investment in saving 10x time later when someing 100 miles away in a different files breaks and it's been caught, as opposed to it creating a support ticket in a week or two.
Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
381–390 of 424 posts
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#382- regular expressions, including the hairy stuff like back references or lookarounds. When you need it, you're glad you know it exists, event if you need a few minutes to look for the syntax.
- shell scripting + Linux commands. Not having friction when writing a shell script is amazing, it's extremely productive.
- awk. I rarely use it (I use cut, sed, or perl one liners in priority), but to make some non trivial changes it's great to be able to keep a state between parsed lines.
- git. I've never had to delete/re-clone a repository since I've read the Git Book.
- SQL querying. Same thing, I have no friction when I need to write group by, CTEs, or other intermediate stuff.
If you do frontend stuff:
- CSS. It's a quirky language so you need to learn how it works properly, not hacking stuff here and there. I've never had any issues doing anything in CSS since I learned it for real.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#383A lot of those are pretty domain specific. Calculus is 10x only because it lets you get into fields where calculus is 10x. I have no idea what a general everyday coder would do with it. I could list tons of design patterns, like separate mutable and atomic readonly copies of the same data, but they wouldn't be universal, although patterns are wonderful. The closest thing to a real 10x I know is laziness and respect f…
I agree, it’s not usually a good use of time to reinvent the wheel, but what if there are unacceptable (e.g.) security risks with all the existing solutions? Then “just right” means “adequately addresses realistic security risks, where core fails to do so.” Developers correctly focus on building things, these aren’t often solid from a security perspective, and sometimes that matters. Abstracted, my point is that your…
I think developers almost always do address security, it's just that security is insanely hard and most aren't dedicating security specialists.
CVEs are almost always patching in hours to days on mainstream software, it's rare to just leave doors open, the difference seems to just be in how much people tolerate things that might possibly have an unknown risk, just because they are big or use dependencies, or because they allow a user to do something that might be a bad idea in some contexts(Like have an unencrypted hard drive).
If you need extreme security, or some other specialist requirement, you're total right, mainstream ecosystems can be unsuitable.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#384Learning to adequately estimate probabilities and make decisions based on those probabilities is extremely powerful, and that's true whether you use those skills in your investments, your career, or your relationships. You can get a lot of practice on sites like Metaculus[1] and Manifold Markets[2]. I've also found a lot of useful discussion around these and similar skills on LessWrong, a site dedicated to the art of…
Has anyone tried to use these kinds of forecasting skills to improve software delivery estimates? Software developers are notoriously terrible at estimation and lately I've been thinking that we should look to Superforecasters[1] for inspiration about how to improve. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster
You might find How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard useful. - https://hubbardresearch.com/about/applied-information-econom...
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#385I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely…
It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest.
"Landing the plane" as they sometimes say.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will give you a fairly specific answer that comes from my history of going to therapy for anxiety and depression. Whenever I find myself in an anxious or uncomfortable situation, the thing that I need to remind myself is that things are going to turn out okay for me, whatever happens. I do this by working my way up a version of Mazlowe's hierarchy: 1. Am I physically safe? Can I breathe? Can I move my body? 2. Do I…
During stressful times, I’d have agoraphobic attacks in the car. They were pretty terrifying. I’d open all the car windows and blast the radio. But you know what worked much better? Solving math problems in my head.
My go-to is trying to visualise and rotate various 3D shapes, like a cube, trihedron, dodecahedron…
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#387I mean, this sounds narrow, but going off of what you think are 10x multipliers, in terms of getting more bang for your hour/buck: * Fully understanding how SQL prepares queries; optimization strategies * Embracing garbage collection in JITted runtimes, mainly JS for now * Being able to diagnose and replace a squeaky belt in your car * Know what a cat is saying when it meows at you and indicates something in the vici…
Replacing the cat with a obedient well trained dog, may increase happiness. Seriously, well trained dogs are perhaps the biggest life hack a person can do.
The German-style Dachshund is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on earth.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable; I’d love to be more at ease on uncomfortable situations. Any tips?
I'm going to go a different advice route then other commenters here. If you went to the gym and did a really easy workout that was comfortable.. that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure. We don't learn in the comfort zone. We learn and grow by pushing ourselves where we feel like we might fail and then pushing until we fail. Success isn't a game of…
You sound like me 10 years ago. Be careful in pushing Yourself in the gym until total failure. It might be directly correlated to injury. Especially for Your shoulder, knee joints and lower back. It's tricky to have good joints and be very big and buff all Your life. Muscles grow, joints do not. Doing lower than 8 reps will help You grow, but it will kill Your joints.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#389Knowing how to use your tools. Operating systems, window managers, editors, debuggers, cli&gui tools in general, keyboard shortcuts etc. I often find the lack of this pretty jarring, watching how slow and ineffective some people are when using their basic tooling, even though they are a couple of years into their career and have written a todo app in a dozen currently cool languages/framework on the side. I feels a b…
I find general computing skills to be one of the best predictors for overall employee performance.
Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to go a different advice route then other commenters here. If you went to the gym and did a really easy workout that was comfortable.. that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure. We don't learn in the comfort zone. We learn and grow by pushing ourselves where we feel like we might fail and then pushing until we fail. Success isn't a game of…
> that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure. Umm. Actually, as far as I know, that's completely false. What you're describing is a bad way to train your body. If you're failing reps, you're training your body to fail. I.e. "one more rep" culture is misguided. You don't want stress or exhaustion hormones in your system. If your goal is enhancing your…
I don't love the marketing "feel" of this source but it is a good and comprehensive guide on what failure means in a lifting context: https://athleanx.com/articles/should-you-train-to-failure
You don't "train your body to fail". You may be training bad form - and form failure is failure.