Developer Productivity

_{Photo by MORAN on Unsplash}

These are things that affect improves developer productivity significantly:

Hardware

1. A Fast Computer
2. Bigger Display
3. Multiple Monitors

• You can preview the application on one screen and keep the IDE or DB open on the next.

Software

1. A Good IDE
2. Plugins to automate things
3. A modern programming language

Dev Himself

1. Typing without looking at the keyboard
2. Initially: Use GUI tools instead of command
3. Later: Skip both GUI and Manual Command Line: Creating tiny scripts (.bat/.sh) to automate repeated actions.
4. Understanding the requirement properly.
5. Prototyping the User Interface to avoid confusion. Paper prototyping is enough for many cases.
6. Thinking and having the thoughts organized before writing the code instead of thinking while coding.
7. Knowing if the algorithm needed is common that an open-source solution is readily available.
8. Googling the right thing while debugging.
9. Not over-engineering. Example: Don’t use microservices if your application isn’t big. ¹
10. Keeping code clean
11. Single tasking
12. Automated tests and TDD ²

Footnotes

1. The Problem With Microservices ↩

2. Habits of Efficient Developers ↩