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There is a dilemma that others pointed out: you need to know the industry pretty well to be aware of the pain points. On the other hand you tend to settle for t
by mynegation 11y ago
There is a dilemma that others pointed out: you need to know the industry pretty well to be aware of the pain points. On the other hand you tend to settle for things you get accustomed to, taking for granted that "things are the way they are". One way out of it is every time you find yourself slightly frustrated at something, but just continue schlepping, ask yourself: do things _really_ have to be that way? Is there anything that can be improved, any single aspect?
Just to give you an idea from the area you know well: programming. It is not a secret that a lot of programming these days boils down to searching stackoverflow and copy pasting the code fragments. You switch from an editor to SO, do a search browse from comments, pick one, copy paste the answer, format it.
As a developer you usually have a large monitor or dual monitors. What if you had an editor plugin that on a shortcut would open SO in the browser, searching on the question that you already typed in. Few other shortcuts give you the movement across answers, another shortcut copies nicely formatted code from the currently selected comment. Bonus points for automatic renaming of variables according to the type information if you have it.
It shaves only seconds to minutes from the workflow, but imagine how many people are doing it how many times a day, and this might be an example of the problem totally worth solving.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI don't think that the search+copy+paste is where all the time is; the time is spent on looking at the seven questions that almost ask how to solve the exact same problem you're facing, then reading the twelve answers (none of them marked as the correct one) that almost look like they might be what you're looking for, and then trying to figure out which one is the easiest one to start from and then cobble together with the others to actually fix the issue.
- grkvlt 11y agoOK, how about highlighting some error message in a log file, right clicking and choosing a menu option that googles for the string (filtering out dates, times, host/domain names and perhaps some filenames too) then opens a browser window with a tab for each SO answer? Now _that_ is definitely part of my debug workflow. Not sure its the next killer app though. Actually, I could probably knock it up in half an hour with AppleScript and Automator on OSX, as a new 'Services' menu item...?!
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI fiddled with Intellij plugins; seems like it would be pretty easy to write if you've written one before, maybe a weekend project if you have passing knowledge. I'd give myself a week, including the time to search Stack Overflow :)
- brudgers 11y agoSpeaking of SO and editors, there's sx.el for Emacs. https://github.com/vermiculus/sx.el https://github.com/vermiculus/sx.el