Posts tagged with productivity
A short and sweet article by my colleague Seb.
I was always adding features because I’d expect other people to expect them. It’s a trap! You’re not making people happier by guessing what they might need. You’re not doing anyone a disservice by building things for yourself.
Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]
Zander Nethercutt provides some great insights in the mechanisms in play that can lead to burnout.
When we see long weekends and think “work before play,” when we see Friday nights and think “sleep before clubs,” when we see escalators as accelerators and not opportunities to “just take a second,” we’re nothing more than hyperrational prisoners making a decision that would be inaccurately characterized as a dilemma because the answer is obvious.
Read more [medium.com]
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I've been using PhpStorm for quite some time now, but never took the effort to fix a few minor annoyances I had with it. Getting rid of the default comment for new PHP files First up, when creating a new PHP file or class you PhpStorm will add this comment block like this by default: /** * Created…
Benjamin Eberlei wrote a post on why and how he got rid of Slack in his company.
We have moved away from Slack at Tideways over the last three months, because I found Slack is already annoying, even with just a four person team (plus the occasional freelancer). For me, it disrupts deep work phases and knowledge lost in the depth of chat history.
Read more [beberlei.de]
After tweeting out a screenshot, it often get questions around which editor, font or color scheme I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using. IDE I mainly program PHP. Mostly I develop in PhpStorm. Here's a…
?shell tip?
— Travis Northcutt (@tnorthcutt) September 6, 2018
brew install tesseract
alias ocr='screencapture -i ~/tmp/screenshot.png && tesseract ~/tmp/screenshot.png stdout | pbcopy && rm -f ~/tmp/screenshot.png'
Then, run `ocr` in your terminal, select text in an image, and...
✨it's copied to your clipboard ✨ pic.twitter.com/KEsiDasu8l
Read more [twitter.com]
Remy Sharp, a well known JavaScript developer, published a cool list of standard CLI tools replacements.
I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line. As for me, I've been using the command line since 1997, first at university when I felt both super cool l33t-hacker and simultaneously utterly out of my depth. Over the years my command line habits have improved and I often search for smarter tools for the jobs I commonly do. With that said, here's my current list of improved CLI tools.
Read more [remysharp.com]
Last week I stumbled upon this article titled "GitLabbers share how to recognize burnout". It list these points to recognize burnout: You're constantly tired You no longer enjoy things Your job performance suffers Your relationships are strained (You have a hard time remembering…
Andreas Creten, co-founder of madewithlove, wrote a good blogpost about a few aspects of their company culture.
There are three requirements for making good products: developers with the right skills, decent product management and ideal working conditions. The reason why so many of us wear headphones has to do with the latter. As a software developer, the last thing you want is distraction: colleagues talking to each other, the sound of a coffee machine, a printer and so on. Distraction prevents you from getting “in the zone”, a state of mind in which you deliver your best work.
https://medium.com/we-are-madewithlove/why-is-everybody-wearing-headphones-522a61de27ca
iA writer is a great app to write text without any distractions (I'm not paid to say this ?). On their website the developers wrote an inspirational article that urges you to not only consume content, but also to create it.
You may have heard that the best way to deal with the “information overload” is to switch off your devices. To take a break from the Internet. Go for a run. Roll out the Yoga mat. Read a book. Talk to your friends. Switching off is good advice. But eventually, you’ll be back. How about changing? Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link.
https://ia.net/topics/take-the-power-back/
In the beginning of the year people tend to compile lists with everything they want to achieve in the next 365 days. But sometimes, instead of wanting to learn or start something new, it's also good to leave an old thing behind.
A little over 2 years ago I started a weekly newsletter for Linux & open source users, called cron.weekly. Today, I'm sending the last issue in what is probably going to be a pretty long time. I need a break.
Here's why.
tl;dr: I've got a wife, 2 kids, a (more than) full time job, 2 other side projects and a Netflix subscription. For now, cron.weekly doesn't fit in that list anymore.
https://ma.ttias.be/im-taking-break-cron-weekly/
There's really no shame in calling it quits on some things to make place for fresh activities. The last couple of months I've seen some people close to me stop doing things they were once passionate about, but didn't fully enjoy anymore. And in each case it turned out for the better.
? Tip of the Day
— Jacob Bennett (@JacobBennett) September 26, 2017
Press T while in a Github Pull Request to get a fuzzy search for all changed files. ? pic.twitter.com/LOQsJ9z0vZ
Read more [twitter.com]
On the Tighten blog Samatha Geitz sums up the benefits of giving developers one day of "free" time a week.
About a year ago, Tighten officially implemented a "20% time" policy for its developers. This means that, on any given week, we only bill our clients for 32 hours of developer work; for the other 8 hours, developers can work on whatever projects they’d like to (as long as they can readily come up with an explanation of how it benefits the company in some way.) ... Here are some reasons that you may want to consider experimenting with a policy like this
https://blog.tighten.co/give-your-developers-20-percent-time
Eric L. Barnes of Laravel-news and dotdev fame, did a little research on the most used fonts for programming.
Everyone has their ideal development setup, and many have spent countless hours customizing it to perfectly suit their needs. Outside of a color scheme, the next typical change is the font in use and every year new fonts are introduced giving us more to choose from than ever before.To find out what everyone is using, I asked on Twitter and Facebook and had a ton of responses. Based on the answers here is a list of the top 5 programming fonts in use today
https://laravel-news.com/2016/10/top-5-programming-fonts/
I'm a big fan of Fira Code myself. It has some nice ligatures and it just looks very good. Here it is in action in my IDE:
Gary Hockin is a developer advocate at JetBrains, the firm that created PhpStorm. In this Nomad PHP video Gary shares some of his favourite PhpStorm secrets.
Tim Pettersen shares some of his git aliases.
Git has a strong commitment to backwards compatibility: many powerful features are hidden behind options rather than exposed as default behaviour. Fortunately Git also supports aliases, so you can create your own commands that do all manner of Git magic. Here’s a selection of the more useful (or at least entertaining) aliases defined in my .gitconfig
https://hackernoon.com/lesser-known-git-commands-151a1918a60
If you want to learn some neat bash tricks, read this excellent read by Sam Rowe.
If you’ve ever used GNU/Linux, chances are good that you’ve used bash. Some people hold the belief that using a GUI is faster than using a CLI. These people have obviously never seen someone who uses a shell proficiently. In this tutorial, I hope to show you just a few of the amazing features bash provides that will increase your productivity in the shell.
Bill Sourour has some good tips on how to manage your time.
There’s no time for anything. At least that’s how it feels doesn’t it? No time to learn all the things you think you need to learn to stay ahead of the curve. No time to go back and refactor that ugly piece of code. It works (sort of) and there’s a deadline approaching. No time to write unit tests for everything. No time to write documentation or comments for the next guy who gets stuck maintaining what you wrote. No time to think. No time to breathe. No time!Well… if you take the time to read this article, I promise you’ll find yourself with more time for what’s important.
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/finding-time-to-become-a-better-developer-eebc154881b2
Some great coding tips written down by Joeri Timmermans on the Intracto blog.
As a developer it's your duty to take good care of your code. It's not enough for your code to work, you also have to make sure it's well written and readable. If we spend 10 times more time reading code versus actually writing it, this means the readability of your code is directly related to your output and the output of your co-workers. So providing cheaper reads will not only create happier co-workers, but also increase the productivity of your whole team.
http://blog.intracto.com/how-to-save-a-kitten-by-writing-clean-code