Chapter 11. Powering Up Your Productivity
Focus on being productive instead of busy.
Tim Ferriss, American entrepreneur, investor, and author
You may have heard of the so-called 10× developer, the software engineer who is thought to be 10 times as productive as an average developer. Whether they truly exist is debatable, but it’s undeniable that there are people who get tasks done faster and more efficiently than others. To become one of them, always look for ways to improve—starting with your developer toolkit, code editor, command line, and all those little utilities senior engineers seem to know about. This chapter will help you customize your development environment and become a more productive software engineer. You’ll learn how to take control of your editor, how to navigate the command line with ease, and why mastering keyboard shortcuts is a superpower.
Optimizing Your Development Environment
Early developers had to make do with fairly rudimentary tools. Luckily, you have a veritable plethora of amazing, full-featured editors like IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code. But installing a tool isn’t the end of your journey; it’s only the beginning.
Warning
Feel free to explore different settings, but take care not to let it become a time sink. If you aren’t careful, you might find yourself tinkering with fonts and themes when you really should be working. It is wise to timebox your experiments. Taken too far, customizations can also make it nearly impossible to pair or work effectively ...
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