Trying to Make My Life Easier While Coding
Disclaimer: These are just my thoughts. Or rants. :P
Every day I code. I face problems. Usually I get immersed in the problem. These days I try to be lazy. I try. I think of how to go past the problem, get rid of it, not face it in the future, make my life easier.
I also don’t like to sit idle, waiting for my tests and build. I have a macbook pro 2017 version and even that’s not enough sometimes 🙈 we really need to work on better software folks. Something that takes less memory (RAM), less CPU, overall less resources. Speed is needed yes, but not by killing our machines 🙈😂 I usually run Alacrity, Firefox, Visual Studio Code / IntelliJ, Sublime Text. Nothing more. I don’t open all of em at all times. But usually, that’s the max I open. Very rarely Chrome too.
Recently I was running “make build” in my golang repository and it just made my laptop fan just spin like crazy. I was joking to my team mate how it would kill my laptop if I was running a build on a rust repository
From that time, I have closed almost all those dead tabs in my Firefox which I always kept saying I’ll read but never did 😂
I really need to start checking how to reduce the whole craziness about my fan speeding up. That’s when I usually check what’s going on. Activity monitor, energy icon. I need to install htop and learn about it 😂 and learn about top too
Oh yeah, I forgot a few more apps that I run. Docker!! Unimaginable software. I already get so big docker images which take up lot of space 🙈 and then later I found out that it takes up quite some resources 🔥 and then Postgres app. I’m not sure if it takes lots of resources. But I run very simple queries and don’t have so much data, so I think I’m good :)
I also don’t like waiting for my CI/CD pipeline. A lot of my team mates just do it in their local machine. Now, there’s two sides to it. If you are doing development and testing, doing it from local during that phase is fine. But if you are sure it will work and just deployment is left out, I would opt for CD pipeline and jolly well click a button or two and finish it off. I could do it in my local. But why. Also, the pipeline exists for a reason. If it’s not working or not used, why even put it there? May be I’ll go read more upon CI/CD pipelines and come back. Even I don’t know too much. But for me, doing it from local looked error prone and I had to do some extra stuff for the setup. But pipeline is cool. It just works. I’m lazy and I like it. It makes me push myself to be more productive and get work done soon and go home and go do something else
I would recommend everyone to start being a bit lazy and more productive. Spend less time. Give yourself a bit less time, make it scarce and see how you use it ;)
I usually think of doing some investments - for the better future.
- Write some automation to make things faster
- Write tools to speed yourself up, to speed up whatever your build is running
- Use your cache, but wisely! ;)
- Try to see how you can fail fast
- When you have a bug, Write tests for your bugs
- Make your error messages easier to read and understand
- When your tests fails, make your tests fail in a good manner so that the failure can be understood, so that it’s easier to fix whatever is causing the failure.
- Use your debugger to debug easily? Seriously, debuggers are the best. It’s like magic :P
I’ll keep adding to the above list I think. Or write another post later. ;)
Just whatever that makes your life easier, think about it. Just don’t accept things as they are when they are annoying you :) If you can do something about it, at least have a thought about it. May be when you have time, you could act on it to make your life easier :)