Ask HN: What tool/trick has most improved your programming productivity?

Interactive debugging. "Most bugs are a result of the execution state not being exactly what you think it is" (Carmack) and it's astonishing how many people just refuses to effectively debug using an interactive debugger, which allows for easy inspection of anything, at any moment, with a REPL for a given state of your program, including call stack inspection/jumping and what not. Some say that "printing" and/or "logging" is just "enough", when those are other debugging techniques and often needed too. Heck, even some say that "if you need to step through your code you already are in bad shit" just as an excuse.

Knowing how to do effective, interactive debugging in any language is a major step in productivity: it helps in so many ways: learning, diagnose, getting things done...

I like to leave off at the end of the day knowing what the next step is. I leave a small task that I could easily do then and there. This way I can start my morning off with a simple, quick, productive task. This gets my momentum rolling. I learned it reading about some famous author that used to use this trick.

Other fun productivity tricks include drawing a simple diagram when you can't focus or don't know what to work on next. I also try to have tasks that take all different levels of focus and cognitive energy in the backlog so that I can choose a task based on my mood.

Meditation. Not the type that keeps you calm, but the type that acts as internal debugging.

All my issues with procrastination come from some deep internal issues, for example, an aversion to working hard, sleeping early, or wanting to spend a lot of time on games as some sort of status symbol.

A lot of these come from mental scars in our past, or even the wrong cultural conditioning. Basically just think what we would do if we were in complete control of ourselves, and why we're not doing that. And then dig really deep to find out where. You'll definitely know when you strike the nerve - it can trigger a sudden rage or tears. But hitting that nerve reduces the control it has over you.

Keeping a private "playground" code repository that hosts various "trivial"/useless projects you've flash through in your brain during free time. For most of us, a simple application prototype is good enough.

Keep them buried for some period (maybe a month or so), then review back your code and see what's the good, bad & ugly you used to have (e.g algorithm usage, memory allocation, code style, correctness). I love this kind of "writer's retrospection" to see how much we've grown.

I like the Pomodoro method. Basically, focus on a task for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break. Every 4 blocks, take a 15 minute break instead.

I work at home, so I do housework in some of those 5 minute breaks. It's different enough that it helps clear my mind enough to focus again after the break.

I'm still trying to find a good way to plan these work chunks, but so far I think emacs org-mode will work pretty well.

Test driven development. Making your tests first, or at least early, helps you mentally nail down what you want your software to do. It also helps you think defensively early-on about corner cases and race conditions.

But that isn't really where the biggest benefits lie.

When you come back to that code a year later and have to make changes to it, but have forgotten how it works, having all the tests pass with good coverage provides a significant (but not absolute) level of confidence that you didn't break anything.

Given that so much development time is spent editing/updating code, rather than writing it from scratch, this can be a huge speedup in productivity.

Prettier for auto formatting. Tailwind for CSS.

However, the biggest win was having a custom React boilerplate better suited to my needs than anything else that's out there.

Jetbrains IDEs and learning using flashcards.