In general, would you say that developers tend to be a tech minimalist when it comes to their general computing?
I've been chatting with a few programmer friends lately. I noticed that, while they were tool builders, their general productivity toolbox was relatively dull and minimal. For example, none of them use productivity apps like Evernote and OneNote. I asked them why, and they said that most commercial apps were bloated and unnecessary. One of them prefers Pinboard to Pocket because Pinboard was "lean and to-the-point." List goes on.
I imagined that developers were tool builders and they would embrace many apps as much as they build them. But, at least the people I chat with, they seem rather indifferent toward many of the apps people talk about in, say, "20 must-have productivity apps and utilities!" articles.
What do you guys think?
But, at least the people I chat with, they seem rather indifferent toward many of the apps people talk about in, say, "20 must-have productivity apps and utilities!" articles.
Indifference seems like the perfect response to those articles :-)
Choosing good tools can take more time than it seems, in my experience, as can keeping up with updates, or switching when you want to something not included in your current tool. So only invest two hours comparing document management apps if you're going to save more than two hours.
I think a lot of devs are both more comfortable with bare-bones tech; and less trusting of complex software. Just as chefs all seem to have some dish they will never, ever order because they know too much about how it's made... we know too much about software to believe the marketing. We know more moving parts means more stuff to break.
So when we do pick something complex, we go all-in to make it worth the risk. This is why you can't pry a developer's favourite text editor out of their hands!
A recent discussion about photo management software showed that many of us just put our photos into directories in (cloud storage of choice). Because that works unlike, say, iPhoto - which tries to make things so "easy" that it creates an unholy nightmare you can never escape or get your photos back out of.
I do know lots of devs who use evernote though. But personally, text files in a folder in dropbox work perfectly well.
I used to be one of your messy lazy developer in my 20s who loved complexity.
As I moved in my 30s (almost mid 30s now).
I have started to clean up my head and my actions.
The longer you are at this the more likely you are to end up in one of two camps. Those who say "tools are the answer to everything because we want to sleaze by on no effort for a quick cash grab", and those who say "An over-reliance on tools prevents you from doing a quality job, which means if you have ethics, liability, and accountability involved then sooner or later your shoddy results are going to come back to bite you."
... and those groups usually cater to two different audiences, those looking for long term answers with proper investment in time and money, and people who want the quick flash in the pan for what amounts to little more than "get rich quick scam" style hopes and dreams utterly disconnected from reality.
Which is why so many startups fail inside their first year. They either use the credit mentality of "pay more later for something they can't afford now" which bankrupts them come bill time, or they got saddled up and taken for a ride by fly-by-night wannabe's with all the business trustworthiness of Ron Popeil, Don Lapre, or Reed Slatkin.
Sad part being many people get caught up in that bandwagon out of ignorance, and become blinded to just how sleazy what they are doing is. That's no wrongdoing of their own, it's just being caught up within the "mob mentality" by the outright lies. Again, ignorance isn't an insult, just means you don't know. You can FIX ignorant. Ignorant becomes stupidity when one willfully ignores facts just because it's inconvenient.
The truth is often inconvenient, that's why it's so unpopular and people cling to the first convenient fairy tale wrapped in soothing-syrup words that they hear.
For anyone who's taken the time to actually learn good practices, the intent of the underlying languages, and a host of other things that should be required before having the brass to call oneself a "professional" a great many of these so-called "tools' aren't easier, or simpler, and certainly do not produce professional quality results. They often promote bad practices, ignore the intent and reasoning that created the underlying tech, and worst of all -- they often just get in the blasted way!
Something the nun who taught me Pascal told me back in the early '80's. When she wasn't rapping me across the knuckles with a ruler every time I forgot to indent or de-indent my code formatting.
Sounds trite, but it's true. Smaller, simpler codebases built with smaller simpler tools are actually faster to develop, easier to maintain, and more reliable in the long term. The concept of throwing more code at it and relying on fat bloated tools as somehow providing "ease" is a flat out bald faced LIE... but it's a very popular LIE so anyone who's been suckered in by it goes full-on mental when you dare to expose the LIE for what it is.
Just like the lesson I learned working in marketing and development in the '90's
VW's "Think Small" campaign being a perfect example of this, as is the entire "flat design" movement that led to things like Google's Material Design. This website -- hashnode -- has a very simple clean layout with pleasing choices and a minimum of pointless artsy-fartsy "gee ain't it neat" nonsense. It is an example of that lesson in action!
Having less pointless 'bling' works well with that first rule since it means less code to do all the extra nonsense like slideshows nobody cares about or has time to digest, animated trickery that only impresses five year olds, etc, etc.
Something else the fancy tools make it far too easy to just slop in there any old way and go "look at how cool and shiny this is" -- whilst not giving a flying purple fish if the end result is actually USEFUL.
... and of course there's Wirth's Law
Painfully true as processing power at commonly affordable pricing has been at a relative plateau for about half a decade. See how there's zero legitimate reason given my workload to replace my five year old 4770k in the gaming rig/media center, and my crappy little 2ghz quad core Celeron J1900 is overkill in my workstation!
Which is why the times I do use tools, I prefer to stick to simpler older ones as they actually let me get the job done with less overhead. Less overhead means faster. It's why for an office suite I've gone back to Office 97 now that Win10 and WINE have both eliminated all the buggy behaviors found in XP/VIsta/7/8 and older versions of WINE. It's why my graphics editor of choice is Paint Shop Pro 7.0.4. It's why my editor of choice is Flo's Notepad 2.
Clean simple tools that do not get in the way, do not slow me down with pointless hot trendy nonsense, and work with my job flow instead of trying to dictate their own upon me.
Particularly when a lot of the bloated slow crap like autocorrect, autocomplete, and colour syntax highlighting bangs the breaks on my development speed. Between not being able to read the illegible acid-trip of colours and constantly having to fight autocorrect/autocomple on formatting, what's being closed, or even what I'm trying to type to the point I'm screaming at the display "Oh for F* sake, just let me type it in!"... well, not a fan.
Goes with once being capable of 100wpm and even with fighting off Parkinsons pushing past 80. Also part of why I'm a mechanical keyboard snob. Buckling spring or Golf Tango Foxtrot Oscar
I also like many others have a dislike of having all my eggs in one basket tool-wise. I prefer my FTP be separate, my language be separate from the editor. I'd rather see the REAL error LIVE in the ACTUAL environment -- or a VM facsmile of same -- than what the editor THINKS the error MIGHT BE.
Even just simple nonsense like tabbed editors get in my blasted way as a step BACKWARDS in functionality -- at least for the ones like IDE's that insist on shoving everything into one MDI window with no means of detaching them.
I prefer separate windows because as a multi-display user I might actually want those windows on different displays. It's very handy to put side-by-side on the left display my PHP, CSS, and JS, whilst having FF and Vivaldi sharing the center display, and the portrait mode taskbar on the right display along with chats, VM controls, FTP client, terminal windows, etc, etc. More so since unlike many people I actually know how to use my taskbar. Well, once you drag modern Winblows back to being USEFUL with 7 task tweaker and Classic Shell, but even without those it trashes the TOYS that are a Linsux window managers with their "we'll tell you what's going on when we feel like it" attitude or OSuX's "oh you want to know what's going on? here, have a cute meaningless picture" -- they all suck, just in different ways at different things.
Separate processes / program instances being even better. I still write assembly, and when doing so it's possible for a cock-up to not only take out the program you're developing, but to even screw up something like the stack which can result in random other programs going bits-up face-down. It also doesn't help that many IDE's (yes Eclipse, I'm looking at you) seem to be unstable buggy wrecks that crash all the time. With everything shoved into that one program instance it goes down, you lose ALL the windows. You run a bunch of smaller self-contained editor windows one goes down, the others are still there and just fine.
Though the simpler editors due to their simpler nature rarely if ever get that banjaxed since there's just not enough code in them to go that wrong.
It's why as much as I want to like Atom or Visual Studio code, I have serious trust issues in regards to their basically being full stack web applications. How can you have trust issues with that? You work with web applications! You make them!!! -- Exactly. I know what to expect.
Same reason chrome and other blink based browsers putting each tab into its own sandboxed process thread is a good thing -- no matter how many in the industry who don't know any better poo-poo it. It means if something notoriously unreliable -- flash, HTML 5 video playback, rogue JavaScripts -- goes south, it only takes out that one tab and not the whole bleedin' browser!
In any case, far too many tools are built for wrong reasons.
1) For the sake of building a tool. "Just 'cause" is not a reason to do something as a project other people will use. GOOD learning experience though!
2) To make 'simple' something the creator doesn't understand. Unfortunately because they don't understand it, it most often never gets implemented properly.
3) To simplify something that shouldn't be simplified. This is the trap called "false simplicity" where in making something look or feel "simpler" or "easier" you have in fact reduced it to the point the actual task is harder to do, and/or the result is incomplete.
False simplicity is an increasingly common mistake happening development-wise. I guess I can't say that's too surprising though as the "form over function" mentality creeps out of the province of artists under the DELUSION they know what design is, and into the front-end and back-end developer mindset.
Just because it LOOKS simpler doesn't mean it IS. Queue jokes like the Macbook Wheel parody. What could be simpler than just one giant button? Everything is now just a few hundred clicks away! Yay, progress...