idea

Productivity – A key skill in development

February 1, 2015 in Programming

Been a while since I posted, but I’ve recently got a few things down lately I felt the need to share.

A major asset to being a developer is the ability to be productive. Remember, time is money. One thing that always irks me when working with junior developers or designers is them doing actions that I felt could be done much quicker with a proper IDE or practice. So much time is wasted doing repetitive things every single day.

Ever watched someone navigate a folder hierarchy to get to a file they want to open? A good 30 seconds or more can be spent there, especially if that file is on a network mount!

With a proper IDE with good navigation support, navigating to a desired file can be drastically reduced. I personally own a license to IntelliJ IDEA 14 Professional, and use it for my Java projects and until recently Web Projects. I value efficiency so much, that I now have even purchased PhpStorm 8, even though IDEA supported PHP. Namely for things like Debugging, but thats another topic.

PhpStorm tailors the experience to web development more, but some of the key notes are still in IDEA.

Things such as opening a file, if you work in an extensive codebase thats been developed over many years, can likely be pretty deep and take a while. But with IDEA and PhpStorm (And likely other IDE’s too, I know VIM does similar), a Key Combo away gives you a nice search box that you can type in a class name or file name and find the exact file you want.

If that file is on a network mount and you have a varying file structure that you cant remember exactly where that file resides, how many minutes per ACTION are you wasting opening up that file?

Then inspections… The ability to see errors in your code before you even run it. I’m not talking about just syntax errors here. Typo in a variable name? That’s not a syntax error, but a good IDE will show you that variable is unused, and another variable hasn’t been defined yet, giving you a sign you have a problem before you even leave your editor.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. IDE’s are built to save you time, yet so many people feel they are hard core because they built a website in Notepad++. You are not hard core, you are wasting time. Use the tools that have been built to make you more productive, and strive to increase your productivity.

I personally recommend Jetbrains products as they have a STRONG focus on productivity (Help -> Productivity Guide) and get more small productivity features all combined into 1 product that many other smaller editors have. You have so many goodies to play with to make you more productive. But the key point, use an IDE, be productive, save you / your company time, and stop trying to show off by claiming you did it all in Notepad. The only people your impressing is juniors who don’t know any better.

If you have a good developer skillset, don’t waste your precious time on inefficiencies in workflow.