? 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
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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
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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
Jack McDade, creator of Stamatic, designer of several Laravel ecosystem sites, on his blog:
I’ve been playing video games again. I feel fantastic and my head is clearer than it’s been in a while. Here are my thoughts on the topic and why I think video games are important and not even remotely a waste of time.http://jackmcdade.com/blog/why-i-play-video-games
Dries Vints does not blog often, but when he does it's very much worth your time to read.
We all have specific ways of setting up our computer. It's all different somehow. The apps we use, our IDE settings, what shell we prefer, what programming languages we work with, the tools we prefer. How on earth are we going to get that specific setup back the way we had it before our computer broke down?https://driesvints.com/blog/getting-started-with-dotfilesEnter dotfiles.
You can find Dries' dotfiles on GitHub. Mine can be found here.
Developers can appear very unproductive at times, sitting staring at the screen with our headphones on and very little in the way of keyboard clackety-tap. This however is when we are doing our thinking, when we are building up, adding to and rearranging the mental model of how our code will work. This is the biggest and hardest part of development.http://thetomorrowlab.com/2015/01/why-developers-hate-being-interrupted/Imagine how it feels to have that interrupted at random by a telephone call or somebody walking over to talk to you. It’s horrible.
I have met hundreds of developers. The best ones always have a side project or two that they hack away on at night. As an employer I encourage that, but I have heard that a lot of workplaces ban personal projects.http://david.elbe.me/development/2014/09/26/side-projects.htmlSo let's talk about why I think that side projects is a good thing, how I use them to get better and what you have to look out for.
https://medium.com/brigade-engineering/hacking-the-flow-state-b2451d0bf7baOften, when I’m able to slip into a state of flow while coding, I will produce more in a single afternoon than I could in several days of non-flow. Yet this is often an elusive state to obtain. Luckily, research dedicated to this topic in recent decades offers some help. Here we’ll look into both the stages of flow and how to obtain the prerequisites for flow, making it possible in the first place.
