The Productive Programmer

Chapter 1. Introduction

Productivity is defined as the amount of useful work performed over time. Someone who is more productive performs more effective work in a given time interval than someone less productive. This book is all about how to become more productive as you go about the tasks required to develop software. It is language and operating system agnostic: I provide tips in a variety of languages, and across three major operating systems: Windows (in various flavors), Mac OS X, and *-nix (Unix and Linux alternatives).

This book is about individual programmer productivity, not group productivity. To that end, I don’t talk about methodology (well, maybe a little here and there, but always on the periphery). I also don’t discuss productivity gains that affect the whole team. My mission is to allow individual programmers the tools and philosophies to get more useful work done per unit of time.

Why a Book on Programmer Productivity?

I work for ThoughtWorks, an international consulting company of about 1,000 employees spread across 6 countries. Because we are traveling consultants (especially in the U.S.), we are a demographically very young company. It came to pass at one of our company outings (where beverages were served) that I starting chatting with one of the People people. She asked me how old I was and I told her. Then, she gave me an off-handed compliment(?): “Wow, you’re ...