Software devs, how have you sped up your workflow? • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by BigRedDog1669 » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

joelschw wrote: post #17

Flankk wrote: post #3

Be careful with premature optimization. It's a nefarious form of procrastination because it appears you're being productive. That said, I want to learn vim but I have more important things to do right now.

Are there any frameworks for avoiding premature optimisation? I'm looking for some content to share with some new teams.

There might be a good framework that I'm not aware of, I think you have a good question.

But some of it is probably not learning and setting up frameworks for stuff until a problem has become a bottleneck. Ask your customers (consumers or other business unit) what is needed right now and enable the scale that works in the short term. Don't just schedule programming time, management time, daily standup time, weekly meeting time, in your calendar and try to fill that up to look socially acceptable. The solution should follow the problem. It seems that often people forget that. After a while of using business frameworks, sometimes the frameworks prevent the problems from getting resolved rather than enable them. Maybe huge companies can't afford any downtime if the traffic spike is 500%+, but smaller companies are often changing and need some flexibility.

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

#22

Post by nickd2001 » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

Empty dishwasher or hang laundry when stuck on technical problem. Answer often comes far quicker this way. ;)

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

#23

Post by nozzlegear » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

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 time I’ve wasted in the last few years just waiting for webpack to build.

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

#24

Post by hzlatar » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

Constantly asking myself “do I really need to do that”? You should always keep the focus on what do you ultimately want to achieve with the code you are writing. Most effective developers I’ve met mercilessly cut on what they spend their time.

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

#25

Post by llbbdd » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 11:09 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #23

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.

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

#26

Post by lukeck » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 11:32 PM UTC

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 tedious when done manually.

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

Learning how to identify and talk about the tradeoffs I’m making made it easier to avoid rework.

Learning how to run containers, originally using docker and now podman made it easier to get whatever version of whatever program I needed quickly.

Learning how to debug and divide problem spaces made it easier to overcome problems.

Learning how to respond to incidents made it easier to get things working again.

Learning how to automate builds and deployments with CI/CD made it easier to focus on the code.

Learning how to use observability tooling made it easier to understand what normal looks like which in turn made it easier to understand when and why things weren’t normal.

Learning how to learn a new code base or tech made it easier to get up to speed when starting or joining something new.

Learning how to identify and focus on the next most important, smallest problem made it was more to produce value.

Learning how to work out what was important to stakeholders and co-workers made it easier to tailor my message and get buy in.

Learning how to mentor and coach made it easier to get things done as there were more experienced devs around me.

Learning how to trust in others made it easier to produce great things with great people and love what I’m doing.

Learning when to shut up is something I’m still figuring out.

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

#27

Post by mbrodersen » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 11:45 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #4

I find that optimizing the butt-in-seat work has far less impact than optimizing meeting attendance. That doesn't just mean skipping worthless meetings, it means coordinating with your company to put meetings in specific blocks of time, leaving large swaths of free time for deep work. (Easier said than done, I know.)

Well my company goes one step further: we very rarely have meetings. People are directly responsible for the parts they work on, are expected to do what is required, and talk to the people needed to get things done. We have no time wasting micro managing middle management. It is one of the most productive companies I have ever worked for. We routinely outcompete companies 100 times our size.

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

#28

Post by accountofme » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

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

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

#29

Post by lukeck » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

lukeck wrote: 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.

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

#30

Post by hijodelsol » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #23

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…

I almost did the exact same thing today but with Vite [0]. Initial build time of a pretty large project is now 930ms instead of 20s and build time was reduced from over a minute to about 10s. Really excited to experience the performance that native ESM enable!

[0]: https://vitejs.dev