Tool Sharpening: April 28, 2014

Tuesday, 29 April, 2014 — development improvement

Back in the fall, Ben Orenstein of thoughtbot was on the Ruby Rogues podcast and talked about sharpening tools. Making his vim profile better, interacting with his desktop better. In some way, he’s making his life as a developer better, every day.

He said:

I’m a huge believer in the power of habits. I think the things you can manage to make yourself do regularly can have incredible results. And so, a few years ago, I’d say five years ago, I decided to get kind of serious about making my environment really excellent and improving my efficiency that way. And so, I got in this habit of spending the first ten or 15 minutes of my day on tool sharpening. And so, what I started was I started a little text file that I would add to during the day. So, when I was doing something that felt inefficient or felt like whenever I had that inkling, “There must be a better way of doing this,” I’d add it to the list. And then I’d pull one of them off in the morning.

And so, I started most mornings by just doing something simple like making an alias for a command I use in the shell a lot. Or something like, I finally need to research how the Vim expression register works and go do some diving on a readme or something like that. And I thought of it as sort of slowly sanding down the rough edges of my environment. So, anything that kind of like irked me, I would try to spend a little time on every morning. And what I found was not very long of this, I was noticeably faster at the things I needed to do every day. And it was starting to have a huge impact on my productivity. And so, I started talking about that.

Five years of daily tool sharpening or tool making seems like it would lead to some transformative changes in work habits and flow. To that end, I’ve spent some time recently attempting to make some adjustments to my own environments. I’ll enumerate some of them:

• Read up on homebrew services
• Adjusted my tmuxinator set-up
  • Added a profile for a Tech Week project
  • Added tmuxinator invocation shortcut
• Installed the Silver Searcher
• Set-up ctags in a project as an experiment
• Installed + purchased Dash
• Repaired tools + resources links on my tools page
• Installed MsgFiler
• Created a clipping to insert an Emacs-style counterpart comment in BBEdit source files
• Found a Safari extension that can normalize the size of Safari windows
• Installed Total Terminal for a keyboard shortcut available terminal window I can use for one-off commands.
• Updated BBEdit prefs to use Dash for “Find in Reference”

This isn’t an exhaustive list of what I’ve done since my curiosity was piqued by what Orenstein was describing. I wanted to share the list to inspire someone else to try out the practice and prompt myself to reestablish the habit.

I plan to revisit this with new entries occasionally.