This is the exact same silly argument that people at Reddit used to justify buying the new macbook pros for all their developers. It starts off by implying that developers are 100% efficient w/ their use of time and any time spent saved will be spent doing something productive, instead of say: browsing Hacker News. And then it uses that implication to show off exciting statistics like "you will gain 5 weeks of developer time!".

I really feel like this is delusional thinking in the software industry and it seems to be widespread.

Counting seconds like that isn't exactly correct in my experience. I find that I actually don't need to go that fast on the whole.

For instance, reading HTML docs in a browser with a text editor vs using a fancy IDE. Metrics say IDE wins, but I don't think those seconds shaved are in the critical path. And there are other benefits to the non-IDE workflow.

  > If automating one repetitive task saves you 36
  > seconds and the equivalent of a working week per
  > year, automating 5 similarly time consuming tasks
  > will get you back 5 weeks per year.
  > 
  > How would I solve this specific problem? Use a
  > newer framework with Hot Reload support.

Use a real debugger instead of printing variables

"Print real variables instead of using a debugger"

The value of automating isn't saving a few hours of developer time spread over years. It's improving the developer experience, which is immensely important. Bonus points if the automation removes some human error, such as fat fingering something.

It and the benefits from it cannot be easily measured. But good managers understand its value.

As others note, being forced to context switch is quite damaging. If I have to context switch to press a green button every 30 minutes, sure it only takes 1 second but that's not the point. I've worked on projects that had dozens of these "green buttons".

> Did you know you can get a public URL for a Node application being served from localhost or 127.0.0.1 on your local machine, even if its behind a firewall or corporate network?

Great way to irritate your security team.

> Use Vimium and test your web applications without a mouse

Or just... Test it without a mouse? I don't get why Vimium is recommended here. While its a cool extension, like a fraction of a percent of the users of your web application will be using it.

> For every change it takes 36 seconds before you can get feedback and try out your changes. This might not sound like a lot, but if you are doing this for every change this might happen 50 or more times per day. That’s 1800 seconds, or a half an hour that you could have spent doing other things. > > Over a 5 day working week, this adds up to 25 hours or just over a day of time lost. So if you can solve this problem, it will be as if you worked 6 days a week instead of 5 when all you did is remove a repetitive task.

I think somebody got some wires crossed here. 36 seconds * 50 times per day * 5 days is 9000 seconds or 150 minutes per 5 day work week.

Also, it's not _exactly_ the same, but https://xkcd.com/1205/ comes to mind.

expose reminds me to ngrok. Are they similar services?

Article synopsis: "Use a modern IDE"

Bash scripts? We'll have to agree to disagree. I love that all his other programming recommendations don't work if you're coding bash scripts.

Some good tips here!