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Tools & Productivity

The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.

Any year
2887

Tidy First?

“Software design is preparation for change; change of behavior” Tidy First? is a new book by Kent Beck. It is a short little book, only about 100 pages (and lots of white space on them)…

2890

Test-case reducers are underappreciated debugging tools

Test-case reducers are less well known than they should be, and those who are aware of them don’t always realise the variety of ways we can use – perhaps even abuse! – them. In this post, I’m going to explore some of the things I’ve learnt while using these wonderful tools. I’ll start at the basics, because the idea…

2892

Why I teach vim

The why of why people use vim has been covered fairly extensively, so I thought I would spend a little time explaining why I teach vim to my high school students, even in 2020. It all began when I …

2898

Chrome developer tools to master

With the advent of modern frameworks, ES6 and the increasing risk of security everyday, knowing how to use Chrome developer tools can give you a major boost in productivity and help in easy diagnosis of a website’s performance. This article aims to give an overview of different features available in Chrome developer…

2899

Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know

2901

Just Let Me Write Digits

Digital identities and what they mean for the web have become a hot topic of discussion in the last few years.They have also brought many controversies: age verification laws and what they mean for online anonymity, Wikipedia potentially having to verify the identify of its users in the UK, the reliance on official…

2906

I am a puts debuggerer

Update (2023-06-28): Added “I required a file, but I want to know what files were actually loaded” I love puts debugging I am a puts debuggerer. I don’t say this to disparage people that use a Real Debugger. I think Real Debuggers are great, I’ve just never taken the time to learn one well. Every time I try to lean…

2910

Sorting in Emacs

In this article, we will perform a series of hands-on experiments that demonstrate the various Emacs commands that can be used to sort text in different ways. There is sufficient documentation available for these commands in the Emacs and Elisp manuals. In this article, however, we will take a look at some concrete…