

Ask HN: Do Hackers spend too much time sharpening their axes? - sathishmanohar

I've noticed the trend in myself, I've researched about a gazillion text-editors and IDEs, at the end of the day, they all do the same (with some differences, Ofcourse). But, I always feel something is wrong, and I search for better tools all of the time.<p>I also the same trend in hacker news, Anything close to Vim Config or Bash Productivity, gets high votes?<p>That makes me wonder, do we sharpen our axes more than we really should?
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Pewpewarrows
It's in our nature. We'll spend an hour writing a script that would save us
maybe 5 minutes of work, but for us that's a net gain because the work is
instantly finished the next (theoretical) time the problem comes up. We get it
beaten into us as developers to never repeat ourselves, so if we see it
happening in other things we instinctively try to abstract it out into
something easily repeatable.

While on paper it might not be worth it a lot of the time, I find it starts to
pay off emotionally when I'm deep in the zone hacking on a project. You know
the feeling, when you have to interrupt your marathon coding session to
quickly take care of something maintenance-wise. I remember a command that
came up when I was "wasting" a weekend looking up bash tricks, and then hop
right back into what I was doing. Otherwise I would have had to come to a
complete stop, spend a good portion of time solving my issue, and then likely
the rest of the day is shot because my concentration was broken and I'd rather
just triage e-mails instead.

In short, my mental attitude has improved the more I learn tiny productivity
tips, because of how they compound into one another to keep me doing what I do
best: crank out quality code.

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anigbrowl
Yes.

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sathishmanohar
Atleast, you saved a lot of time with this precise comment :D

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dgunn
He must so he can get back to his vim vs emacs article ;)

BTW, I do this all the time too. I sure a lot of us have had "OS fever" where
you continuously install a new flavor of linux every day for a week until you
decide to go back to your original. There may be no cure for this...

