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As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

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Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#211

Post by skydhash »

vacuity wrote: post #117
planb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know you or your work. But I know (senior) developers that don't use a debugger and I've often noticed that when fixing a bug, they don't build a full mental model of what really goes wrong and often just fix the symptoms. Think "that shouldn't be null, we need a null check here" instead of "why is this value null? we should check here, but also make sure the caller works correctly."

On the other hand, though this is n = 1 and from 2000 (and it is classic Linus): Linus Torvalds: > I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will. I use gdb all the time, but I tend to use it not as a debugger, but as a disassembler on steroids that you can program. > I don't think kernel development should be "easy". I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug. I do not think that extra vi…

Debugger for me is more about inspection than actual debugging, especially when dealing with a complex systems. It's possible to just use a printf, but the debugger gives more information. It's rare that I need to do stepping. I mostly just want to see the stack trace and the state of the program. One of the nice thing about Common Lisp and Smalltalk is to be able to do this any single point.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#213

Post by jwpapi »

I see that point but now discussing approaches with AI replaces that most of the time, not because the AI is genius but because me formulating it helps me to think and me getting challenged helps as well (I ask for it)

The input speed on keyboard is just way faster than with pen:/

Sometimes I still use notebook but it becomes less unfortunately.

But my my challenges are just not challenging

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#215

Post by stronglikedan »

ednite wrote: post #118

Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actua…

I read a study a while back that said context switching costs ~15 minutes on average. I don't know how true it is, but my bosses have always believed it and tried to respect it.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#216

Post by nemofoo »

ednite wrote: post #118

Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actua…

This is a great insight. I have no data to back it up by my experience is very similar

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#217

Post by spidersouris »

jwpapi wrote: post #213

I see that point but now discussing approaches with AI replaces that most of the time, not because the AI is genius but because me formulating it helps me to think and me getting challenged helps as well (I ask for it) The input speed on keyboard is just way faster than with pen:/ Sometimes I still use notebook but it becomes less unfortunately. But my my challenges are just not challenging

> me getting challenged helps as well (I ask for it)

Can you elaborate? Do you have any examples of such interactions with LLMs?

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#218

Post by brettgriffin »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #202
brettgriffin wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying. Yes, but the post above is pointing out that you would be significantly slower without an IDE, compiler or debugger than you would be without a pen/paper. In fact, I don't think you would be a professional programmer if you didn't have them. Saying you like a notebook and pen while designing and writing software is very different tha…

> significantly slower without an IDE, compiler or debugger … In fact, I don't think you would be a professional programmer if you didn't have them. This is a strange take. Programmers were around before any of those tools were. And today, even many professional programmers do their work without using any of them: they use text editors, they write interpreted languages, and they use printf()-debugging or other techni…

They are examples, the exactness is not what is important here. Choosing something that is not connected to electricity, an OS, or the internet to be a software developer's _most important_ tool is, in fact, the strange position here.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#219

Post by dalmo3 »

cleak wrote: post #149
ednite wrote: post #118

Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actua…

The book Smarter Faster Better introduced me to the concept of disfluency - the idea that extra friction such as awkward fonts, new environments, different tools, etc will pull you out of autopilot mode and force you to think in new ways. I haven’t seen references to it elsewhere, but it’s changed how I approach problems and learning the last 9 years. Switching to a notebook is one great way I use to trigger this as…

Interesting. For me it's the opposite, e.g. just changing keyboard layouts between pc and mac breaks my brain hard, and I feel useless.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#220

Post by WCSTombs »

diggan wrote: post #190
gjadi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I noticed the same and sometimes I change my emacs theme just to get a fresh perspective. Sometimes I also disable syntax highlighting when typing so I won't get distracted.

> Sometimes I also disable syntax highlighting when typing Was waiting for someone to comment this. It's a somewhat known strategy if you have to read through a bunch of boring code you don't want to work with, and find hard to focus with, to turn off the syntax highlight and somehow the brain stops glossing over/skimming the code and starts to pay more attention. I found it led to marginal difference at best, as wit…

Along similar lines, sometimes I print out code on paper and make notes with a pen, sitting far away from my computer. Of course there's no, or very minimal, syntax highlighting then.
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