Developers: Focus on the code

When I started programming it was simple. Start up your Apple IIe with the DOS 3.3 disk in the drive and get a prompt. From there you write code. No text editors, no IDEs, no issue trackers or project management tools. It was primitive, yes but with no other tools taking up valuable space in memory or your mind, you could focus on the code.

It wasn’t that different when I got my first real programming job. Yep, we were called programmers. We used vi, a simple text based editor. And guess what, we didn’t have version control. Wow, no version control? Yep, that wasn’t a good thing. It was a pain in the ass to lose a day’s worth of coding when you accidentally overwrote a file. But still it was simple. Just think of all the git commands that take up space in your mind.

Today, we have all kinds of tooling for development. There’s even a site called stackshare.io dedicated to keeping track of all these tools. I love this site by the way. But I still think we owe it to ourselves as developers to simplify the process. Like writing on medium. Medium lets you focus on your words. I want to focus on the code!

My biggest frustration as a consultant starting a new gig is ramping up on the project management and issue tracking software. Every project has a different stack. Some use Jira and Basecamp, others use GitHub and Asana or bugzilla or fogbugz. Getting up and running on a tool is a waste of time. Especially when I have more than one contract going. That’s why I came up with a new/old way for tracking issues with TODO comments.

imdone will organize your TODO style comments into a trello like task board and automatically update attached issues when the token (TODO, FIXME, etc) or content of the TODO changes. Set up your integration once and stay in the code. Where you can have focus!