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Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#241

Post by analog31 »

fish45 wrote: post #145
analog31 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough I can't use IDE's. They simply throw way too much information on the screen, and my brain gets overloaded. So I have to sheepishly confess that I do my programming in IDLE. There, I said it. But I think a take-home lesson is that the "right" visual environment is a function of your eyes and your brain, and might not necessarily be the most sophisticated environment.

just wondering, why idle instead of vscode with minimal extensions, or sublime text maybe?

Excellent question. Actually my cube mate uses vscode and is happy with it, and the latest incarnations of WinPython come with vscode built in. So maybe I owe it to myself.

For now, my "IDE" is Idle on one side and Stackoverflow on the other. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#242

Post by pengaru »

afc wrote: post #156

Probably an unpopular opinion but... Write your own text editor. I've been working on my own ( https://github.com/alefore/edge ) as a side project and using it exclusively for about six years. I don't expect it to be very usable by other people (it's very customized for my workflows, I suppose; e.g., it's mostly useful for writing C++ and Markdown files) but, because I know it inside out (and I've invested in making…

This should be more generalized to "write your own tools that suit your workflow and use them, iterating on them as usual."

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#245

Post by winrid »

afc wrote: post #156

Probably an unpopular opinion but... Write your own text editor. I've been working on my own ( https://github.com/alefore/edge ) as a side project and using it exclusively for about six years. I don't expect it to be very usable by other people (it's very customized for my workflows, I suppose; e.g., it's mostly useful for writing C++ and Markdown files) but, because I know it inside out (and I've invested in making…

A better way to put it would be "know your editor and environment"

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#246

Post by lostmsu »

ggregoire wrote: post #239
city41 wrote: post #206

The biggest boost in productivity I've had in recent years is switching back to a statically typed language. TypeScript in my case. You can absolutely refactor and change course _so_ much quicker and with virtually no regressions at all. Just the other day we realized a feature I was building didn't handle an important case, and I had to really change the approach. Doing it in a JavaScript would have been dramaticall…

> The investment you have to make to really grok static typing is quite large. It took about 2 years for me to be really comfortable in TS. That sounds a bit exaggerated from my experience. If anyone interested in TS got discouraged reading your comment, it took between like 2 days and 2 weeks for my team to be really comfortable in TS. If you already know JavaScript and if you already have some experience with stati…

To be fair, TypeScript's typing is very overloaded with stuff, and is much more complicated than Java or C#'s.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#247

Post by Izkata »

xeroalt wrote: post #125
growlist wrote: post #37

Learn to touch-type properly. I'm not a shit hot typist or anything, but it does make hours on a keyboard more pleasant. And (hate me) I do judge other devs on it. If someone can't be bothered to invest a few tens of hours on such a key productivity enhancement then what does that say?

What's the value add of touch typing? I tried it for a bit, but it seemed like a waste. I can consistently do ~90-100 WPM on https://www.livechat.com/typing-speed-test/#/ with very few mistakes just typing with 3 fingers on my left hand and 2 on my right. Feels like input speed is one of the least important parts of coding. Did one test for this comment. https://imgur.com/a/GISaU6n

Sounds like you are touch-typing, you just don't use the home-row standard. Neither do I. There's plenty of other ways to do it, they're just not taught classroom-style so people like to discount them.

The benefit of touch-typing is being able to get your thoughts into the computer without interrupting said thoughts to figure out where stuff is on the keyboard. Keeps the flow going.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

#250

Post by lostmsu »

There is one single developer efficiency tip I can recommend: always dive deep.

While sometimes it makes sense to ask around for help on something, you should always spend 20 minutes checking the source of your favorite framework/company's library, and try to debug it yourself.

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