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This article is a real failure in the rule of Profile Before Optimizing. Changing your editor or whatever is a micro-optimization. Among professions where typin
by zelly 7y ago
This article is a real failure in the rule of Profile Before Optimizing. Changing your editor or whatever is a micro-optimization. Among professions where typing is involved, programmers type the least number of keystrokes. Secretaries and data entry clerks type much more and often much faster than programmers. Also, a lot of typing is not even characters into the editor but keyboard shortcuts.
The real time killers are mental--fatigue, boredom, procrastination, anxiety, and so on. How many hours do you spend a week on HN or social media? How long are you going to take to do that big refactor you've been putting off? How long do you spend in useless meetings or chats you're not persuasive enough to get out of? At what point is RTFMing too long procrastination? How long do you spend watching N*tflix at home if you really want to get that side project done?
The bottleneck is never your typing speed or your editor commands. That is snake oil by script kiddies trying to sell you something.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThat's a great and underappreciated point. I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and tedium. But when I do a honest accounting I realize that, even though my newest tweak that took 30 minutes to make will probably save me a hundred hours in the long run, I'll blow more than a hundred hours over the next month procrastinating on HN because of anxiety about starting tasks. Like I'm doing right now - I was supposed to take an hour off for some personal "me and my thoughts time" an hour ago. But HN is just more immediately gratifying. It's true for me and I guess for many (most?) programmers: the limiting factor is inadequate capacity to control my own emotional state.
- zelly 7y ago> I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and tedium Me too, my .emacs.d directory has thousands of commits. It's fun. All procrastination is fun. It feels mischievous and therefore exhilarating.