Check Casey Neistat
Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
121–130 of 137 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#122Little bit of background as to why I think I can answer this: Three years ago, I ran my own web design/development/marketing company, doing a lot of the front end UI/UX stuff, as well as the marketing plans for my clients. I did this, worked another full time job, voluntered 15 hours a week, and was taking 21 credits a semester. After that, for a year, I commuted 5 hours each way to attend a weekend post-baccalaureat…
How do you deal with failure or stuck episodes?
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think having something else to also do is critical. I'm a musician and I kept 70+ hour weeks in school, but 16 of those hours were at gigs, and Sundays were off limits for anything at all - no work at all. It wasn't gigging but just jamming when I later was in startup land for a few years. I found the effect the same. You need something to get your mind completely off work.
To be honest, my current problem is exactly the opposite - I can't get my mind on work. There're always at least three other projects occupying my mind that would be a much better use of my time than the day job except I wouldn't be able to pay my rent with them :(.
I recommend the book _Refuse to Choose_ by Barbara Scher. It is about how to use that Edison-like tendency of yours as an asset rather than having to stuff it all the time.
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you end up with something like Git, which is easy to use if you have the exact same background/education/philosophy as the person who wrote it, but has terrible usability for pretty much everybody else.
I don't have the same background as the "person that wrote it," and I consistently find the git command-line tools easier to work with than other tools (SourceTree, magit-mode, vim-fugitive, etc [1]). I think that in this case, it's just the mental model of a DAG[2] of commits that people have trouble wrapping their minds around. The tools are just there to help you slice and dice the DAG. [1] I haven't used Tortoise…
When git was still one of many competing DVCSes - I tried darcs, and the CLI was pretty great. Spoiled for ever.
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just not sure how it's possible to have any API committed to memory these days, though I agree that if one picks a small number of dependencies as core tech, one stands a far better chance of doing it and will realise better productivity outcomes than someone who compulsively includes every 30-line $PITHYNAME.js novelty to hit HN and GitHub. Still, I grew up writing backend C in Linux environments, focusing heavi…
I think you've captured well the spirit of my comment. The point that I didn't mention - and that may partially answer your question - is that the other thing all of these "highly productive programmers" did is narrowly specialize in a particular niche where there weren't good existing solutions but are a number of potential users. There are still C libraries that remain unbuilt! Actually, with the decline of good C…
IIRC Brad's approach was more of a social hack/MVP: wrote memcached in perl, convinced people of its obvious importance, let other folks write the C version (which I'm pretty sure he could have written, judging by his Go code).
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#126Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed: The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up. If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type. So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are thoroughly…
> I read an interview with Guido van Rossum, Jeff Dean, and Craig Silverstein within Google where they were asked basically the same question, and the answer all of them gave was "The ability to hold the entire program in your head." There are memory improvement techniques, developed over centuries, which can help. Think of it as latency reduction in a source code memory palace. http://mt.artofmemory.com/start
One thing I never quite understood: would these exercises also improve your memory when you're not using the techniques explicitly? Somehow having the information organized in your mind in a more cohesive manner, so that recall is always possible by traversing the graph...
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I read an interview with Guido van Rossum, Jeff Dean, and Craig Silverstein within Google where they were asked basically the same question, and the answer all of them gave was "The ability to hold the entire program in your head." There are memory improvement techniques, developed over centuries, which can help. Think of it as latency reduction in a source code memory palace. http://mt.artofmemory.com/start
One thing I never quite understood: would these exercises also improve your memory when you're not using the techniques explicitly? Somehow having the information organized in your mind in a more cohesive manner, so that recall is always possible by traversing the graph...
Yes. It's like learning a new language, which changes how concepts are represented. Or increasing your vocabulary and improving your writing, which then influences thinking. Moving beyond the alphabet to additional symbols, opens up new options for both representation/storage and pointers/indexing.
Eventually, images come to mind without awareness of the retrieval process. The slow part then becomes translating the images back into alphabet-based language, for communicating with other people.
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think having something else to also do is critical. I'm a musician and I kept 70+ hour weeks in school, but 16 of those hours were at gigs, and Sundays were off limits for anything at all - no work at all. It wasn't gigging but just jamming when I later was in startup land for a few years. I found the effect the same. You need something to get your mind completely off work.
To be honest, my current problem is exactly the opposite - I can't get my mind on work. There're always at least three other projects occupying my mind that would be a much better use of my time than the day job except I wouldn't be able to pay my rent with them :(.
Maybe the side projects are too close to the day job? That's kind of what was nice about playing music - it was totally different.
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#129I think touch typing helps in addition to holding the program in your head.
Re: Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, my current problem is exactly the opposite - I can't get my mind on work. There're always at least three other projects occupying my mind that would be a much better use of my time than the day job except I wouldn't be able to pay my rent with them :(.
Maybe the side projects are too close to the day job? That's kind of what was nice about playing music - it was totally different.
If anything, it would be the job being too close to side projects. I learned programming to build cool things, the career was only a lucky accident for me.