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768 points speckx | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.29s | source
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soiltype ◴[] No.45672833[source]
This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm most interested in finding on HN. How do other developers work, and how can I get better at my work from it?

What's always interesting to me is how many of these I'll see and initially think, "I don't really need that." Because I'm well aware of the effect (which I'm sure has a name - I suppose it's similar to induced demand) of "make $uncommon_task much cheaper" -> "$uncommon_task becomes the basis of an entirely new workflow/skill". So I'm going to try out most of them and see what sticks!

Also: really love the style of the post. It's very clear but also includes super valuable information about how often the author actually uses each script, to get a sense ahead of time for which ones are more likely to trigger the effect described above.

A final aside about my own workflows which betrays my origins... for some of these operations and for others i occasionally need, I'll just open a browser dev tools window and use JS to do it, for example lowercasing a string :)

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chipsrafferty ◴[] No.45673383[source]
I'd love to see a cost benefit analysis of the author's approach vs yours, which includes the time it took the author to create the scripts, remember/learn to use them/reference them when forgetting syntax, plus time spent migrating whenever changing systems.
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te_cima ◴[] No.45673616[source]
why is this interesting to you? the whole point of doing all of this is to be more efficient in the long run. of course there is an initial setup cost and learning curve after which you will hopefully feel quite efficient with your development environment. you are making it sound like it is not worth the effort because you have to potentially spend time learning "it"? i do not believe that it takes long to "learning" it, but of course it can differ a lot from person to person. your remarks seem like non-issues to me.
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akersten ◴[] No.45673661[source]
It's interesting because there's a significant chance one wastes more time tinkering around with custom scripts than saving in the long run. See https://xkcd.com/1205/

For example. The "saves 5 seconds task that I do once a month" from the blog post. Hopefully the author did not spend more than 5 minutes writing said script and maintaining it, or they're losing time in the long run.

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1. janalsncm ◴[] No.45677970[source]
Not all time is created equally though, so I disagree with that xkcd.

If something is time sensitive it is worth spending a disproportionate amount of time to speed things up at some later time. For example if you’re debugging something live, in a live presentation, working on something with a tight deadline etc.

Also you don’t necessarily know how often you’ll do something anyways.