Programmer productivity tips

The coding profession is one that has been practiced by a lot of really smart people for many years. Not only that, but it’s also backed by hundreds of million and billion dollar industries. So it’s no surprise that there is hardly any challenge in the programming world that hasn't been attempted before. In fact, I would dare say that there is no new challenge in the programming world. The implication of this realization to the topic of productivity should be obvious. Programmers today have a multitude of giants on whose backs they can stand on. Not utilizing that advantage equates to massive amounts of productivity gains that are never realized.

One example of such pre-packaged advantages are the capabilities found in your IDE and development tools. Many IDEs have capabilities such as refactoring tools, code templates / snippets, code assists and auto complete, debug capabilities, quick fixes and code analysis. In addition, most IDE's are extensible and easily integrate with plugins that can provide further code analysis, visualizations, and development life cycle management. Static code analysis tools such as Findbugs, Checkstyle and SonarQube can be used to ensure that best practices are being followed, common mistakes are caught, and code quality, readability and re-usability standards are being met. Some of these tools take it further and provide reports on duplicate code, code complexity, code coverage, and encourage continuous integration practices.

Some of these IDE capabilities and development tools do have a learning curve, but its no where close to having to learn how to use the vi editor on Unix :). And making the little time investment required can really improve how quickly we can churn out high quality, mistake free code that we can proudly post on github. After all, isn't that what all good programmers strive for? Being able to say "my code is better than yours"!