What things you learned that skyrocketed your productivity as a web developer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5752322

by 31reasons • 13 years ago

3 4 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am an iOS developer. I developed some Rails app 3 years ago (full stack). It seems that there are lot more advances has happened in last 3 years. I was never a highly productive web developer because it was something i had to do to get the job done. Now I am thinking of refreshing my skills on web development.<p>What do you think is the most productive stack for web development right now? or what tools/languages make you highly productive in web development ?

artemio• 13 years ago

stackoverflow.com and google.com

hardwaresofton• 13 years ago

It really depends on what you want to do.

And I think that's a good thing. There isn't a one-size-fits-all best/most productive stack, but I can say I have seen a trend of most of the generally, a lot of stacks that are getting used frequently focus on starting with very little and having modular bits tacked on -- some do this better than others.

Note also, that productivity is different from performance. You might be able to write an app in some language super quick, and it'll look great, but it will be slower than some other language.

Web Framework Shootout (more info than you ever need to know about speed of frameworks, most comprehensive of it's kind I think with some pretty good use cases): http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

But generally, my advice (not worth much) is to envision, plan, design your product, then go find the right tech to make it happen. Especially if you're making your way back into the market, you're going to be exerting some first-time-learning energy anyway, might as well learn something that will go a long way to helping you get what you want.

Ex. If you're about to make a real-time-chat app, you should maybe probably definitely look into node, pub/sub servers like redis, and things like socket.io and html5/css3/js. You maybe should not be looking at PHP, which is not especially good at long polling/async + mysql (at least for the pub/sub bit).

31reasons• 13 years ago

Thank you.

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Here is the one skill that has helped me the most: Learning how to organize a project. Focus on learning how everything will work (design/architecture). Then move on to planning around that design. At the end of each work-session, you should plan the next one. So that when you have to sit down and work again, all you need to do is simply follow your own instructions. No need to waste time thinking about where you left off.

What things you learned that skyrocketed your productivity as a web developer?

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