productivity

All my posts about productivity.

Develop faster by adding dev routes file in a Laravel app original

May 5th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Laravel's awesome closure based routing was probably one of the first features I fell in love with. I take it for granted now, but back in the days, such a simple way of adding a route felt like a glass of water in hell compared to the other frameworks.

Typically, you would only add routes that are necessary for the users of your app. Something that I have been doing for a long time is to create a routes file, called dev.php, with routes that can help with app development.

When I lost a few hundred leads

Dec 1st 2020 – stitcher.io

Everybody makes fuckups. When you do, don't be ashamed, just try to learn from it.

My current setup (end 2020 edition) original

Nov 28th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

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.

Light colour schemes are better, based on science

Sep 28th 2020 – stitcher.io

Brent offers scientific arguments why a light color scheme is better. Personally, since I started using a light color scheme a few years back, I've sticked to it and never turned back.

How to finish your side project

Jul 20th 2020 – hugozap.com

Starting a side project is easy. Actually finish it is hard. Hugo Zap offers some good tips on how to properly finish a side project.

Time to upgrade your monitor

Jun 23rd 2020 – tonsky.me

Nikita Prokopov shares some good insights on why having a good monitor is important. MacOS users: your fonts will look much better with font smoothing turned off.

Inline Parameters Extension for VSCode

Jun 9th 2020 – liamhammett.com

If you’ve ever found yourself asking any of these questions and happen to use VSCode, maybe the new Inline Parameters extension will help you out!

📺 PhpStorm Tips with Christoph Rumpel

Apr 14th 2020 – blog.jetbrains.com

Dancing artisan Christoph Rumpel released a new video series on how to make PhpStorm look pretty and get the most out of it.

Using BetterTouchTool as a window manager original

Feb 17th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

In this short post, I'd like to share how I use BetterTouchTool in my daily work.

PhpStorm settings after 8 years of use

Jan 21st 2020 – stefanbauer.me - submitted by Stefan Bauer

This article is the result of my 8 years of experience with PhpStorm and my best settings that make you a faster developer and let you focus more on the important things.

My Alfred workflows original

Nov 22nd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Alfred is a fantastic tool for macOS that allows you to be more productive. The app allows you to install workflows to make it more powerful. In this short blog post, I'd like to share the workflows that I have installed.

My current setup (2019 edition) original

Oct 19th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

Small Wins

Sep 9th 2019 – davidhemphill.com

Some words of wisdom by David Hemphill

Don't be upset you didn't finish the big feature early in the week. Be glad you figured out what you need to do to finish it in the next few days.

The fear of missing out in web development

Jul 24th 2019 – themsaid.com

Mohammed Said wrote some thoughts on FOMO that resonate with me.

It's a constant pressure on me, and I can imagine how hard it can be on people newly joining the career. In my early days it wasn't that bad, things weren't moving that fast, but nowadays it's crazy.

Add a prefix to your Chrome tabs

Jul 22nd 2019 – twitter.com

Pro-tip: set custom prefixes for your local, staging and production environments using the Tab ReTitle Chrome extension ?
Never accidentally debug the wrong tab again! https://t.co/hRfaKesKwL pic.twitter.com/DU1llvdpQd
— Alex (@AlexVanderbist) July 15, 2019

Keep the MacOS desktop empty

Jul 20th 2019 – twitter.com

? Desktop always a mess? This little script tells macOS to not render desktop icons at all, so ~/Desktop is just another folder and your wallpaper is always unobstructed. pic.twitter.com/GjsmbrZ4c4
— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) July 15, 2019

Bash/Shell Autocompletion for Composer

May 30th 2019 – www.bram.us

Bram Van Damme explains how you can get autocompletion for most composer commands.

Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

Apr 16th 2019 – blog.nuclino.com

Personally, when I want to work on something I just turn off all notification on my Mac.

Probably reached for the phone. Turned off the alarm. Glanced at the time. Scrolled through the Slack notifications. Went through the emails. You will likely continue doing it throughout the day, approximately 2,617 more times, according to some studies. We all do it, and despite all the virtues of digital minimalism, completely giving up those habits is extreme and, arguably, unnecessary. Yet we live in a culture obsessed with productivity and these harmless distractions are wreaking havoc on it.

Don’t forget to be selfish every now and then

Apr 9th 2019 – sebastiandedeyne.com

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.

We’re optimizing ourselves to death

Mar 5th 2019 – medium.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.