Learning about Version Control Systems, 2 years back, has been the great productivity boost for me. I liked the idea of cloning a new branch for every new feature and have never looked back since.
So as a programmer what single discovery has given you the greatest boost in productivity?
For me is the combination of VIM + Snippets. Keeping your hand movements inside the keyboard has been a good productivity boost. And as for the snippets, basically I spend little time updating/adding them, but it pays of by being able to reuse pieces of code that are usually common. For example, a Backbone extend or React Classes, function filters, maps, ways to find a property inside of an array of objects, etc.
That there exist programmable programming languages. The concept of meta-programming.
The discovery of languages like ruby (and more recently Lisp and F Sharp) has significantly changed my perspective on what I used to consider expressive code.
The notion that there is nothing really sacrosanct about the constructs built into the language and you can modify core language features themselves using the language itself, and emulate constructs that are as succinct and expressive as core language features takes the idea of "programming as an art" to a whole new level.
Without guarentee for any money in the future I quitted my daytime job and focus 100% on my own company.
when working with javascript if you want it done quickly just write vanilla
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boj75h3urLU
Just go with it. Just "slide". Stop caring about what others are doing; how their doing; why their doing it. Just do you.
Algorithms and data structures, once i discovered the power of algorithms and data structures it changed me totally. i never saw the use of all of it till i opened my mind
A more curious answer:
Sites and music similar to focus@will
A while ago, it was docker. It really makes it easy to isolate and bootstrap one's architecture.
More recently, it was continuous integration/deployment/delivery. I used to be skeptical about it since I couldn't see myself trusting the results but once I set up push-to-deploy, at least, I haven't looked back.
And, pretty much a month ago, I decided to stop resisting the cloud, which I also found to be a huge boost. It turns out that, while I didn't hate managing architecture (in production), I didn't particularly enjoy it either and I'd much rather write code. And thanks to app engine (the cloud provider I chose), and some help from Gitlab CI, I can do that almost exclusively now.
Can't say which one would be "greatest". Probably the greatest would be - being flexible and combining those "discoveries" together. But I definitely can say that productivity has no connection to programming, it works in every aspect of life.
So, learn the life.
Taking care of my body. Eating healthy, sport, meditation, going to sleep at a normal hour, waking up early. Doing this has resulted in having a lot more energy and motivation to work and study (i am a student). I know a lot of people say this but it really does make a big difference. More than any tooling has ever done for me.
I don't know, for me it was working on something i found inspiring ... versioning and all the other things are cool and maybe helped boosting it. But in the end the most productive things were focus and a honest interest/curiosity regarding the task/application.
Oh and the thing that really helps me is .... the internet .... :D
Nick Redmark
Cofounder of eLiveness
Mev-Rael
Executive Product Leader & Mentor for High-End Influencers and Brands @ mevrael.com
Supratim Chakraborty
Android Developer at CloudMagic and a self claimed UX expert
Josh Montgomery
web developer
Besides version control (for whatever reason, the past few jobs I've had did not use versioning until I got there), I would say the fact that I don't know everything about web dev, and that, not only is it ok to ask for help, but when you do find the right community, finding out the answers to my problems become so much easier :)