6 Tips To Increase Your Developer Productivity

6 Tips To Increase Your Developer Productivity

Hello, buddies! This is a special blog post cause I saw something today!

Now I have 70 Followers! ghghgh.gif

Anyway, back to the topic.

Being productive at something we all struggle with at some point in our career. As a developer when we start working for a company or a client, most of us get obsessed with coding. We spend a lot of time in front of the computer screen writing the code, fixing the bug, reading about the technical stuff, and trying new things in programming. We enjoy doing it and we spend endless hours in coding even on weekends. But today, let's see 6 tips to code productively.

1. Be Less Random

If you’re a freelancer then you should pay attention to this point. A lot of people who are freelancers or work from home or have more freedom in their work are rally poor in planning their workday. Remember that a well-planned structure is really important for success. Even if you work for a company and they give you the freedom to do pretty much everything you want, it’s up to you to structure your workday correctly. Organize your day for everything and structure your work the moment you wake up. It does take a lot of self-control but it pays off to be consistent. Don’t just take things as they come. Try to start working at the same time every day and also take planned breaks at the same time every day. Make a habit to follow a proper routine to stop being random in your work.

2. Use Proper Tools

image.png Having the right tools is vital in any job. For developers to be most productive, the right hardware and software are a must. Find out what tools and programs your team likes to work with. Find out what will work with the tools already in use. And ensure that developers can collaborate if necessary by having compatible software.

Updated hardware is a necessity for effectiveness when writing code and dealing with backend development projects. Also, set policies for how and when someone can obtain new equipment. Set budgets for employees, but don’t get upset if a necessary piece of hardware has to be replaced and will cost you a little more. Remember, it’s an investment in your employees. Happiness can be a new computer that makes their jobs easier. That happiness equals increased productivity when it’s on the company’s dime.

3. Gamify Your Mind

image.png Dealing with repetitive tasks, or with too much work can cause you to procrastinate. Which is why you should create a sort of competition for yourself. Invent some rules, or create goals that will make you feel like you’re playing a game.

For example, challenge yourself to complete your daily tasks in six hours. Make it a big deal! Reward yourself with a night of binge watching of the new season of that TV show you really like, and if you don’t reach the goal, don’t check your Instagram for 24 hours.

Invent whatever rules suit you, do what feels right.

4. Master Your IDE

image.png Developers spend thousands of hours in front of their IDE. It’s one of the important tools and it won’t be a foolish thing if you spend some time in mastering your IDE. You need to know it inside out because any efficiency that you gain using your IDE is going to be multiplied by those thousand of hours that you’re going to spend in front of it. You need to know two things about your IDE…

  • Functionality
  • Shortcuts

Spend some time to learn how to use your IDE effectively through some online resources, blogs, youtube channels, or with the help of pair programming. When you do pair programming you get to know some features, some functionality of your IDE you are unaware of, and some efficient way to do some tasks. You can install some plugins or snippets to increase your productivity. Snippets allow you to not keep writing the same code over and over and some plugins such as syntax highlighting make your code more readable and help you with finding the syntax errors easily.

5. Don’t Multitask

image.png Multitasking: Screwing up several things at once….

Developers need to add this new definition of multitasking in their dictionary if they want to be more productive. They should always focus on one thing at a time instead of being a multitasking person. Do not review someone else code simultaneously in the middle of writing your piece of code in your application. If you think this will make you more productive then you’re wrong. It is also revealed in some research that multitasking is brutal for your brain. When you try to do multiple things together you need to switch between tasks and it becomes a distraction. Instead of being productive, you will find that you need to backtrack a lot because every time you have to find out where you last left off.

6. Work On the Command Line

image.png When you’re a beginner and learning something new it’s ok to use graphical user interfaces, but once you passed that phase you want to do more complex stuff. Using a command-line is a sign of efficient developers and being a developer you should know the benefits of it. Working with GUIs takes much more time than working on the command line. A lot of beginners avoid using it because of obscure syntax and verbose documentation, but once you learn how to work on the command line your productivity increases tremendously.

One of the good tips working with the command line is to create aliases and custom functions for some commands that you find hard to remember or to shorten very long commands. for example you can create an alias for ‘git status’ (shows what’s changed in a git repository) command…

alias g="git status"

The above line allows you to just type ‘g’ for ‘git status’.

So buddies, that's how you can increase your productivity. Happy Coding1