For instance I recently lost a lot of work because of a careless version control screw up.
I try to focus better but there seems to be a limit beyond which I just cant avoid slipping up more often than normal people.
What are the techniques that you use to achieve greater rigour and perfection in your work ?
Read "horror stories", like a crazy bug introduced by an innocent commit, or how forgetting a single line of code can lead to a massive security breach. This will give you some "subconscious awareness" about the power of the tools you are using.
Pre-emptively prevent yourself from making mistakes. If you know you often misuse some command, just make it ask you for confirmation:
function confirm() {
echo -n "Continue? (Y/N) "
read YN
return $([ "$YN" = "Y" ])
}
alias rm="confirm&&rm"
[1] http://gmailblog.blogspot.nl/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sendin...
- Exercise (even walking) to keep the blood flowing well.
- Eat right & drink water throughout your work day.
- Eliminate distractions (HN) and arrange regular periods of silence each day(eg. no radio or podcasts on my commutes).
- Maintain GTD-esque dump buckets for stuff that shouldn't be stored in your head. Get those things out of your head and into your system so that your brain can more easily focus on what needs to be done.
The other option is using stuff like Koality, which allow you to test your code in development with a production environment.
1. Age: the older you get, the more errors you have made in the past, the more careful you are.
2. Meanwhile... make yourself a procedure with bullets (or a decision tree) for critical things and stick to it . Sticking to it is fundamental. Something like "1. Make a backup of the original work. 2. Check the origin of the problem. 2. Check the solution done. 3..."
- Make testing habitual
- Keep a record of everything you do
- Have a backup. Be ready and able to revert.
- Automate what you can
- Create procedures (checklists) for common tasks
- Slow down. Never rush to commit code.
If your problem is focus, identify what the distraction is and deal with it.
When I first started managing NFS storage, I had "Never use recursive" taped to my monitor so I would never do something horribly recursive across the NFS space.