Five Tips to Boost Your Productivity as a Software Developer
Nobody is perfect. Nevertheless, building a few little habits can help us to improve as a person and as a professional. While there really isn’t any secret sauce to self-improvement, remembering these tips won’t hurt and will definitely help you to implement an efficient day-to-day structure.
1. Make your future self happy by writing clear commit messages
Have you caught yourself writing vague commit messages like “minor bugfix” “here some more code” or “my hands type text”? In the moment of the commit, you could not come up with a better message, and that is understandable. But what happens if you want to rollback to a specific time or commit? Or what if you want to restate an amazing function you implemented at some point in the past? These vacuous messages will make it almost impossible to find the related commit.
To write a good and clear commit message you can check out the Angular Commit Conventions. Maybe using the whole header, body, and footer structure is a bit too much for some projects, but just following the header structure with a type, scope, and subject can be incredibly helpful.
Your future commit message could look then like this: “feat (tax-type-form): implement the new flat scheme”. You will start your message by specifying the commit type, which could be “feat” for a new feature, “fix” for a bug, “refactor” for a code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a new feature or “test” for a new test or correction. The type will be followed by the scope written in brackets. Try to avoid writing file names, rather describe the general location. Subsequently, use a colon to separate the scope and the subject. In the subject, you should describe what the change in the commit is about. For the description, you should use the imperative present tense like “implement” and not “implemented” or “implements”.
2. Improve your English day by day
Is English not your native language? Or maybe it is and you just want to avoid typos? Then these two great little helpers are for you.
The first one is Grammarly. This writing tool checks your text for grammatical and spelling errors, but also for punctuation and word choice. Using machine learning and deep learning algorithms, it highlights the bits of your text that could be improved and suggests a correction. You can use it as an online text editor, browser extension and as a mobile app. Different Google services allow you to check your grammar and spelling and even provide you with writing suggestions or autocorrection features, but Grammarly goes one step further and works even more precisely to help you write more flawless texts.
In the world of little online helpers, there is also one that will check your spelling while you write code. If you use Visual Studio Code as your editor, you can download an extension called Code Spell Checker. This tool will highlight any spelling errors and offer alternatives that you can use to correct the misspelling. Therefore, Code Spell Checker can help you to avoid mistakes in variable or function names, but also in comments.
3. Keep on learning by reading technical articles
In the field of software engineering, where technology changes so quickly, it is really important to be up-to-date with the latest developments. There is a lot of sources where you can get your information from, such as Medium, TechCrunch, Developer Tech, or Dev.
For example, Medium allows you to subscribe to a newsletter and get a daily email with recommendations of articles that fit your interests. This can be a good starting point to look for good articles and, if you see anything that grabs your attention, just save it to read later.
Building a daily habit can help you achieve a goal and to create a continuous learning structure. To do so, book a fixed time slot in your daily routine to read software engineering related articles. It could be in the morning, right after you start your computer, after lunch or before finishing work. The “when” is not that important. What matters is doing it at the same time, every day.
4. Organize your files and resources with pins
Maybe you love order and organization, maybe not. In any case, everyone has different online resources that they use on a daily basis. Having them properly organized and easily available can save you a lot of time.
It is pretty likely that you always open the same tabs in your browser. Sure, you can save these often-used pages by bookmarking them, but still, you will have to open them manually every day. A helpful functionality in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox is pinning these websites to your browser. You can pin websites by right-clicking on the tab and selecting “Pin.” Your pinned pages will show up with their relevant favicon over the URL.
Just recently, Visual Studio Code launched a functionality to help organize and pin your files. With this tool, you can pin your most-used files with a right-click and select “Pin”. After pinning a file, instead of the file’s symbol and name, you will just see its icon. Especially when you use a webpack file to control and switch between different environments and/or users, you will find yourself opening this file often. It is quite helpful to have this file always quickly available without taking a lot of space in the tab bar.
5. Feel the relief of an empty email inbox
Who hasn’t seen one of those inboxes crammed with 500 emails? Surely, there are good reasons to store some of them, but are all those emails so important that you need to keep them in your inbox? In most cases, that is pretty unlikely. A solid goal to aim for is a zero-email-inbox. Knowing that there are only a few topics to have an eye on or that require action can be a huge relief.
A good rule of thumb is: A happy inbox is one where you can see your last email without scrolling and using a single line display setting.
The following actions can help you achieve an empty inbox. If a topic is finished but it could be revisited in the future, move it to a custom folder. If a topic is finished but won’t be of interest –like a Bitbucket notification about a pull request approval–, just delete it. When there are a lot of emails regarding the same topic, just keep the latest one.
Hopefully, some of these habits will help you to organize your day more effectively and to improve your productivity and wellbeing. Please do not hesitate to write in the comments if you would like to share more tips. Thank you for taking the time to read this article!
