Productivity Hacks for Developers
How to Move on from the Mundane?
Based on my experience , I’d like to share a couple of approaches I follow to reduce the time spent on unnecessary tasks. What do I mean by this? Tasks which aren’t related to a project but still consume a significant portion of a developer’s time. Go ahead, use this time to read posts on HN and medium.
Create Aliases: Alias is used to shorthand a command or a group of commands.
Let’s take an example where we need to connect to the VPN every time we’re starting our day, using the following command:
sudo openvpn — config /home/user/Work/vpnconfigs/test.ovpn
This command can also be reverse searched using (Ctrl+R) but that also requires typing some characters & in some cases, we may end up typing nearly half the command before we find it.
Alias could be used to shorten this verbose command.
To create an alias:
$alias rvpn=”sudo openvpn — config /home/user/Work/vpnconfigs/test.ovpn”
Now, on terminal, we just need to type “rvpn”.
$rvpn
And that’s it. We just reduced a cumbersome command to a short and easy to remember one.
Similarly aliases could be shorten other commands.
eg: $alias connect_test=”ssh user@X.X.X.X”
$alias nginx_conf=”sudo gedit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf”
$alias tail_log=”tail -f /home/user/Work/project/logs/gunicorn/access.log”
Aliases could also be chained together using a “;” or “&&”.
To load a virtual environment and also quickly move to the directory of the project:
$alias load_project= “source /home/user/Work/project/bin/activate;cd /home/user/Work/project”
Following are a few examples one could use alias for:
- VPN connect (Alias: connect_vpn)
- Open a configuration file (Alias: nginx_conf, settings_json etc)
- Tailing log files (Alias: tail_access, tail_error etc)
- SSH connections( Alias: connect_test, connect_staging, connect_prod)
Note that these aliases created aren’t permanent. To be able to use them everytime system is started, all the alias commands could be added to /etc/bashrc file
Create Symlinks and utilize Bookmarks:
Symlinks are shortcut to files or folders.
Example of some symlinks:
~/Work/sym$ln -s /etc/nginx/nginx.conf nginx.conf
~/Work/sym$ln -s /home/user/Work/project_part1 project_part1
Just create symlinks to whatever is needed for a project in one folder and bookmark it in explorer. It might look very naive at first glance, but overall it saves a lot of time, especially if you realize that you go have to forward and backward a directory structure for more than 2–3 levels.
Shell script Launchers:
To start work on a project, we usually need the following things opened:
- Running development server
- A couple of Logs tailed
- Database clients
- IDE or editor (Sublime,Eclipse etc)
Running the following script opens a terminal with 3 tabs (log,mongodb,server) and a editor environment. It saves a lot of time which is wasted in opening these manually.
#!/bin/bash
op=””
tab=” — tab”
#Tail log files
cmd=”bash -c ‘cd /home/user/Work/logs;tail -f access.log;bash”
op+=($tab -e “$cmd”)
#Open databases
cmd=”bash -c ‘mongo’;bash”
op+=($tab -e “$cmd”)
#Run servers
cmd=”bash -c ‘cd /home/user/Work/project;export CUST_VAR=$CUST_VAR:val;python manage.py runserver’;bash”
op+=($tab -e “$cmd”)
gnome-terminal “${op[@]}”
subl “/home/user/Work/project”
exit
Shell Script Click execute:
Goto Edit>Preferences in file explorer. Under “Behavior” tab, either set executable files to always run or ask each time. So the shell script created above could be placed on desktop and executed using double click, to avoid opening a terminal and then running it.
I’m going to be write a lot more & you should definitely watch this space for for more. After all, these hacks might as well be termed life hacks. Won’t you agree?
Stay Tuned!
This article has been written by Kartik Godawat, a Senior Developer at Kuliza
