/Productivity

What Is Code Visibility?

- Shanea Leven tl;dr: Onboarding to a new codebase often involves hours of frustration. But, it doesn’t have to. Shanea explains how code visibility tooling keeps codebases from becoming untouchable black boxes. With a shared visual model that can be maintained through code iterations, developers can be more productive and ship code with fewer bugs.

featured in #383


Visual Workflow Automation. Now With Code.

tl;dr: Build powerful automations fast, with all the hackability you’d expect as a developer. Stop provisioning infrastructure and maintaining one-off scripts. Write and automate cron jobs, custom alerts, and ETL tasks 10x faster with Retool Workflows.

featured in #381


5 Ways To Increase Velocity By Removing The Bottlenecks  In Your QA Process

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: With a recession looming and many companies freezing their hiring plans, savvy teams can look at other levers to increase velocity and improve product quality. Here are five cost-effective changes you can make.

featured in #377


Devpod: Improving Developer Productivity at Uber with Remote Development

tl;dr: "In this blog, we share how we improved the daily edit-build-run developer experience using DevPods, our remote development environment. We will start with some of the initial challenges, the pain points we addressed with Devpod, our architecture, and some of our recent successes in terms of adoption and cost reduction. We will finally leave you with some thoughts around the future of remote development at Uber."

featured in #377


Experiment: The Hidden Costs Of Waiting On Slow Build Times

- Natalie Somersall tl;dr: Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub conducted an experiment to understand tradeoffs between productivity and hardware. "When you ask a developer whether they’d prefer more or less powerful hardware, the answer is almost always more powerful hardware. More powerful hardware means less time waiting on builds - and that means more time to build the next feature or fix a bug. But even if the upfront cost is higher for higher-powered hardware, what’s the actual cost when you consider the impact on productivity?"

featured in #374


My Energy Is A Linear Function, Until It Isn't

- James Stanier tl;dr: Monday to Wednesday are high energy, productive days for James, but Thursday is an inflection point where he's tiring. James discusses how he's trying to rectify this: (1) Purposefully trying to work 10% slower. (2) Being stricter with notifications so there's less context switching. (3) Limiting checking messages to within working hours. (4) Deferring non-essential requests and tasks into the following week. (5) Pomodoro technique.

featured in #354


Benchmarking The Impact Of Session Recording On Performance

- Mathew Pregasen tl;dr: One of the biggest tools to arrive last decade was session recording (SR) – a screen-recording-like service that tracked a user’s activity. Typically, SR was popular with marketers and product managers as a tool to learn more about a user’s experience. Most SR providers will pledge that their products do not impact page performance - this post explores that hypothesis. 

featured in #351


How To Tool For Developer Productivity

- Kathryn Koehler tl;dr: Director of Developer Productivity Engineering at Netflix shares what kind of tooling you should focus on building, whether you should build or buy your tooling, and how to measure the success of your tooling in developer satisfaction and productivity.

featured in #345


On Workplace Productivity

- Nicole Forsgren tl;dr: A holistic framework for productivity can be summarized by the acronym SPACE: (1) Satisfaction and well-being. (2) Performance. (3) Activity. (4) Communication and collaboration. (5) Efficiency. Nicole provides 3 insights: Finding flow is key and interruptions are a drag, meetings are both awesome and terrible, and a two-minute daily reflection can help improve your days. 

featured in #345


Automate Pull Request Labels Based On Changed Files With Actions

- Lloyd Atkinson tl;dr: "That’s a lot of functionality that can be built with labels. As an example, I’ll show how to add labels automatically depending on which area of a codebase has changed. This is what I use in every project I work on as it allows maintainers oversight and awareness of the impacts of changes. It does not depend on the language or types of files - it’s based on the git diff and paths."

featured in #340