
Programming magic: Rituals and habits of effective programmers - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/development/67857/programming-magic-rituals-and-habits-effective-programmers
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dhimes
+1 for scratchpad. I use a cheap spiral notebook. It gives me a place (other
than the proverbial "back of the envelope" that I used to use) to write quick
calculations, half-assed uml diagrams to think through the organizational
structure, etc. I keep it as a journal, date and number each page, log the
time of entries. I even put a table of contents on them! Almost never refer to
them; hell, they're nearly incomprehensible a couple of months after the fact.

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jasongullickson
Doing an SVN "Update" before a commit even when I know I have the latest code
(for example, when I'm the only coder working on the project).

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randallsquared
Interesting. I do a "status -u" instead, because "update" without knowing
what's about to be updated scares me (but I've only been using svn
consistently for a few months).

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stewiecat
Running the entire suite of unit tests even though all I'm committing is a
trivial bug fix.

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zacharydanger
I fall into this. Even when what I'm committing is just a markup change that
doesn't even get touched by the unit tests.

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sherl0ck
I always had my notepad + pen beside my keyboard. without those 2 things it
just not feel right.

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mahmud
This is not a ritual of mine, but something widely practiced by those around
me: asking me for favors when I am hacking. I agree to everything!

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gaius
Every morning I come in and stand in the middle of my team's area and ask _is
the site still up?_

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vicaya
Are you a manager?

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blogimus
One of the things I do is run who, uptime, and free when I first log in to our
development server. I'll repeat that periodically through the day. I ps aux if
uptime shows any significant activity.

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windsurfer
Talking with other hackers and programmers about tips and habits for self-
improvement :)

(Which would be easier if I could reply to you guys in a timely manner...)

