4 ms·
Ask HN: Are you a fast developer?
Why? What make a fast developer? Is it rarely having to learn new things? Is it learning a new technology before other people on a team? How do you measure your speed as a developer?
This concept has been bothering me lately. I've been working on a project for a few weeks and part of it took me a lot of trial and error(a week) to find a solution that took me 5 minutes to write. Did I waste that week?
- leesalminen 12y agoNo, of course you didn't waste a week. Every minute spent honing your skills will be beneficial to you later on. I've been told I'm a "fast" developer. I'm still unclear about what it means. To me, it seems as though they really mean "You say what you mean and you do what you say" or "You meet deadlines, don't bullshit and don't overbill". Don't worry about what other people say. Focus on you - the rest will come.
- mrits 12y agoI doubt it's much different than school. We were all fast before an assignment was due. Very few of us maintained our productive habits everyday. So the final product has just as much to do with work ethic as ability.
- bbcbasic 12y agoYou can't objectively measure your speed as a developer. Attempts to try and measure developers' speeds will cause perverse behaviors - like rushing code to get it checked in quickly and making things less generic, splitting up bugs (so more bugs are fixed per month) etc. And this would cause those developers to actually slow down in terms of business value delivered. Don't worry about speed, focus on effectiveness. The trial and error thing - next time see if people can help you either in your team or getting answers online etc. That may reduce the time spent in trial and error but sometimes it is unavoidable.
- pjbrunet 12y agoWhat makes me fast is I press Control-S and my code is live--working--in production. Clients love it. You have an idea--I make that idea work while we're on the phone. Slow devs have six layers of red tape between their code editor and the production server (version control, dev servers, prebuilds...) and they call that agile. Fast devs keep it simple. Fast devs are not afraid of their code, they know what to do. Code works the first time, most of the time. That's a good feeling. With experience, you're confident, most changes are easy and predictable.
- untog 12y agoWhat makes me fast is I press Control-S and my code is live--working--in production. Clients love it. One day they won't. I guarantee it.
- leesalminen 12y agoI don't use the Grunts, LESS, and asset pipelines like most "cool" devs, but Git is 100% worth the effort. From side projects, to enterprise, to my own start up, Git has saved my butt more than once.
- mod 12y agoOutside of the "saving my butt," like saving dozens/hundreds of hours of re-writing (probably by enforcing a backup copy of deployed code), I find git helps me gain time in numerous other ways: 1. git blame 2. git log (to re-assert where I left off, among other things) 3. git diff before a commit helping me to remember to remove test/debug code 4. github/gitlab etc search features occasionally I wouldn't dream of going back to a non-git workflow. PS: less/sass are cool. not necessarily time-savers but they make nice, clean css source.
- iseedeadpeople 12y agoAbsolutely. I can't even imagine not using git, let alone version control. The time saved and improvement in process pays much more than you put in by learning it.
- sharmi 12y agoI doubt you have worked for long and experienced atleast one episode of the cleanup following a substantial damage. If you are really as fast as you claim you are, I suspect you have never worked with anyone before :)
- mathgeek 12y agoThis was also my first thought. Statement like "fast devs are not afraid of their code" are a huge red flag that someone has little to no experience working on a team.
- goodbye_world 12y agoFrom my experience, I develop fastest when I have the following, in order of importance: 1. Adequate and frozen specifications. 2. Tools. 3. Libraries. 4. Testing tools. Even if you are working on your own pet project, get off the computer and write some specifications whilst pretending you are the client. For the other three I mean the thing itself and your experience in using those things.
- CyberFonic 12y agoHaste makes waste. You can only make a comparison of speed if you compare developers on the basis of equal robustness, efficiency, reusability, etc. Once you get on top of the learning curve with any given set of tools, libraries, etc - you would expect to become progressively quicker. But as you have experienced, the learning part can take a lot of time. Assuming that your eventual solution is better (on whatever criteria are important to the given project) than the quicker alternatives then the learning was worth it.
- Lorenzo45 12y agoThe way I see it is it's all about experience. Now that you've experienced that week of trial and error you can complete a similar problem in 5 minutes, whereas someone inexperienced who doesn't have the knowledge you do will certainly take much longer. The people who are fast coders have just done more trial and error in the past and know how to deal with problems effectively.