Developer Productivity
This article is part of the Developer Developer Developer 13 series covering all the talks I visited on 23rd June 2018 and what I learned.
For the first afternoon session, I went to Dan Clark’s talk on Developer Productivity.
Check out Dan Clark’s blog for details of many different talks given at .NET Oxford. He has written up on the same Developer Productivity talk which he gave to DDD South West in April, and the abbreviated version which he gave in December 2017.
He said by learning more every day we can become many times more productive than the average developer. He calls this compound learning: just like over time we get compound interest on our savings, we can get compound interest on our learning if we continue to educate ourselves on better ways of working every day.
He recommends using snippets and note taking.
He showed us a quick demo of workflowy which is a nice “freemium” app.
Dan recommended getting decent noise cancelling headphones to avoid interruptions from your colleagues. At the end of the talk I challenged him on this, stating that although wearing the headphones increases the individuals productivity, it can come at the cost of the productivity of other team members if they need to be talking with the developer.
I asked him if there were any principles of guidelines that could be used to determine when to use headphones and when not to use headphones. He noted that I had ask him a very open question there which might require a whole new talk to tackle in full. Daily Standup meetings can help communicate information quickly at the same time each day. But we should discuss the issue with our teams so that something can be agreed on which works well for the whole team.
On the same theme of having focus on a task without distractions, there is the pomodoro technique, and Dan said there is the Tomatoad timer which comes with Slack integration.
Possibly the best tip was to use LINQPad for database queries instead of SQL Server Management Studio. I have been using SQL Server Management Studio but Dan demonstrated that LINQPad could be used to extract data more quickly and easily.
Dan demonstrated some of the ReSharper shortcuts for time saving.
Dan also spoke about Mind Maps. He uses XMind for quickly planning stuff out visually.
The next tip was using Todo lists and Getting Things Done.
He showed the Eisenhower Matrix (I knew this as the Covey Matrix which seems to mean the same thing). Prioritize work in the following categories:
- Urgent and Important
- Important
- Urgent
- Not urgent and not important.
Work in the first category is emergencies. You want to avoid having too many of those. And once the emergencies are out of the way you should focus on delivering on the important work. An example of something that is urgent but not important is phone calls: they demand to be answered right way, but you may be able to defer that work until later if you are persuasive enough to the person on the other end of the line. Try to politely get the other person off the phone quickly if they are talking about unimportant stuff.
Most stuff that is neither urgent nor important should probably never get done. There should always be some important work left to do.
Zero Inbox
Other tips were:
- Stop trying to multitask
- Multiply estimates by 3
- Good brain nutrition — eat eggs, avacados and nuts, and drink more water
- Write notes for what you will do the next day
There were some questions and answers at the end of the talk. Another attendee made the point that developers were not paid according to their productivity. Dan said that, if a developer is highly talented and underpaid, (s)he can move onto another job where (s)he will be paid more.
However, the productivity tips are not about being in competition with your teammates. The tips can improve the productivity of the whole team.
Finally, being more productive results in developers being more satisfied with their work. And being happier in your work helps to make you more productive. So a virtuous cycle is created.
