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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

> All-in-all the project took me an hour to program

That's amazing. I don't think I've ever written anything usable in an hour.

He's working in a space he has mastery. Like, look at this legend with his live note taking of Inkscape + Latex. I would have been like two orders of magnitude slower https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/

Unrelated to op, never seen this link before, super cool thanks for sharing.

That is amazing.

One thing I often see is that enthusiasts and professionals spend too much of their life and energy working with an inferior set of tools such that they are very dismissive of people expressing themselves faster with a better set of tools, solely because the discipline is no longer required

I am personally all for people being able to express themselves more effectively

As an enthusiast and a professional, I see a lot of people spending more time building a "better" set of tools and/or arguing about the merits of various trendy tools (hello HN) than actually writing code.

If all you ever do is the same kind of thing over and over again (say, build CRUD web apps with the same stack), then sure, go nuts and optimize so you can deploy with a single button press from your IDE. But if you're in a role where the stuff you build varies wildly -- say, any type of startup where you are the dev team or a significant fraction of it -- then diminishing returns sets in very fast.

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/

The beauty of selling tooling is that if you can sell the tooling, the "how often you do task" is multiplied by number of customers and so you get way more value.

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