Ask HN: How do I code faster

6 points by avaid1996 9 years ago | 8 comments

I'd love to be more efficient with my time. Would appreciate any tips like focus tips, editor tricks, etc.

In my experience, long-term efficiency comes from spending less time writing code and more time thinking about it thoroughly first. I slow myself down by writing notes and questions in longhand. Then, after I've done that and written the code, I spend a little more time focused on making my output maintainable and reusable.

That might not be the kind of answer you wanted or expected, but believe me, taking it slow and working for the future will net the most efficiency in the long term.

chrisbennet 9 years ago |

As others have mentioned, "coding faster" implies writing more code quicker when what you actually want to do is write less code.

The way to write less code is to (a) better understand the problem and (b) have a mental toolbox full of good tools you can apply in different situations.

For (a) you need to delay coding - which admittedly really hard until you have a good picture of how you want things to work. For me, when I'm in front of the computer, I don't think as deeply as when I'm away from the computer. Many of my aha! moments come when there are no distraction like when I'm in the shower laying in bed before I get up.

(b) Is just study, curiosity and research.

onion2k 9 years ago |

Put effort in to learning your tools. The number of people who haven't even read the documentation for their preferred IDE is incredible; we use really powerful tools every day, so make the most of them. Customise them. Make them work for you.

smt88 9 years ago |

Extensive static analysis (language with strict type system + linter + hinter) and functional programming have revolutionized my productivity. It helped me write a large program which has been in production for 11 months and has had zero bugs.

kenshi 9 years ago | |

Would love to hear some concrete details about this - I dont doubt you, but I think it would be helpful to have the details.

Would you say you were able to write less code (perhaps reuse more code)? Were the productivity savings mostly on the fact maintenance costs are lower?

smt88 9 years ago | | |

I don't think about "less code" when I'm writing code. You write something (ideally) once, and you read it many times. It's very inefficient to optimize for code-writing when the most expensive activities are learning, re-learning, and maintaining code. If your code is twice as long but easier to understand, you should just make it twice as long.

As far as more code reuse, the tools I mentioned don't affect that. A good rule of thumb is not to write the same code twice. If you write it a third time, move it into a reusable function. I actually rarely write the same code even twice.

So yes, most of the savings come from 1) not having to debug and 2) not doing maintenance until I want the code's behavior to change. With great static analysis and a type system, you might spend 5x more time writing before you run your code the first time, but it always just works when you do run it the first time. It's amazing.

This is a famous talk by Rich Hickey that will discuss some of these issues much better than I can:

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

(Video on the left)

bjourne 9 years ago |

You do it by slooooowing doooown and focusing on the details. Fast and sloppy is NOT the way to go. It might seem counter-intuitive but that is the only way to gain speed.