Ask HN: What are your day to day pain points while coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your day to day pain points while coding?

9 pointscity4111 comments

At my job we collectively have several small but annoying, tedious, confusing or slow operations. What are the things that bug you?

For us:

* Needing to enter our username and password every time we push/pull to github

* Having numerous processes running at once: our app's server, a couple instances of Jasmine, a couple instances of Coffeescript guard, selenium, etc

* Keeping track of which of our many builds are failing/passing

* Debugging and generally dealing with IE

I know there are good solutions to all the above, but for various reasons they don't work for us (I'm leaving the details on that out on purpose). My point isn't to look for answers to these annoyances, but rather get an idea of what annoyances devs see often.

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My problems:

* Payment. Indirectly related to coding. Credit cards aren't common in my country and debit cards often are not visa or mastercard compatible. Fortunately prepaid credit cards are available at nearly every bank. With PayPal and a normal credit card tied to my account I just don't feel save carrying my wallet and laptop around.

* Spread of knowledge. I need to know so much to be able to choose the right tool in every situation. Right now I'm working on a blog/portfolio. I like to use a static site generator. Despite there beeing thousands of comparisons on the web it is hard to assess whether I'm able to build what's in my head. The one that seems capable enough is written in a language I don't speak. I probably have to write my own solution or write a patch in a language I can at least partly understand due to my knowledge of other languages.

With the advent of JavaScript it has become even harder. Backbone? Ember? Angular? Use existing knowledge to write my backend or switch there to JavaScript too? Meteor? Express? Which build system, which module system, async helpers or not? Promises? How to tie everything together?

You could spend more time figuring that out than you spend time writing code...

* Anonymity and my lack of creativity. You need an username for everything. I have yet to find a bookmarking service that just requires my mail adress and a password. And what's with all the twitter and facebook authentication crap sites starting to pop up that don't even allow you to sign it without it...

* IDEs. I can't find one I like. I prefer VIM for typical editing, but Rails projects are so large, in terms of filesystem navigation, that I like a normal tabbed IDE. Aptana with VIM keybindings is okay, but heavy and has some pain points.

* Heroku db:push. Have to use ruby 1.9.2, and it's a bitch to get it working on Windows machines. I eventually did, but it was a big problem for a couple of days.

* Interruptions. My office space is public. I can't always concentrate with headphones on, though.

Our biggest difficulties are:

* The difficulty of eliminating interruptions and isolation

* Inability to work as fast as we would like

* Choosing the right tool for each job while reducing technical debt

* Finding ways to delight internal ande external customers while delighting ourselves, and finding slack to implement them.

I'll better split this into two posts. My solutions:

First problem: Use ssh-agent to store the key.

Second problem: I have several scripts that start tmux sessions with every necessary program running. There are tools like tmuxinator to make the creation of presets easier. I run my own solution though as I need the flexibility.

Third problem: Something like Travis CI?

Fourth problem: Taking a look at all the shims, frameworks and helpers helped me get a general idea of what works and what doesn't on certain IE versions. I wouldn't worry much about the inbetweeners (IE7, IE9). Windows XP is the biggest reason why people use IE8 and if you're targeting that market it would be best to invest in a workflow that minimizes the differences and get as much knowledge about the lacking features of IE8 as possible.

Public key authentication for Github has not worked for you? Can't imagine how that is possible.

Well this submissions is failing spectacularly :) I'm not looking for solutions, but other problems people have.

We have to enter our credentials into github each time for two reasons: we decided to follow the TOS of github and not create work specific accounts for everyone (instead you are supposed to take advantage of github's organizations feature). And almost all of our work takes place on pairing machines. Leaving our accounts open to github across random machines throughout the org is not something we want to do.

checkout `ssh -A`

For your first point make sure your git remote is using the correct format.

.git/config should look like:

    [remote "origin"]
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
        url = git@github.com:user/repo.git

> * Keeping track of which of our many builds are failing/passing

Might I suggest circleci? We use it to build every branch for every developer's fork. It's pretty easy.

Why does that first problem exist? I could not deal with that.

Interruptions.

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