The Productive Programmer

Preface

Many years ago, I taught training classes for experienced developers who were learning new technologies (like Java). The disparity between the productivity of the students always struck me: some were orders of magnitude more effective. And I don’t mean in the tool they were using: I mean in their general interaction with the computer. I used to make a joke to a few of my colleagues that some of the people in the class weren’t running their computers, they were walking them. Following a logical conclusion, that made me question my own productivity. Am I getting the most efficient use out of the computer I’m running (or walking)?

Fast-forward years later, and David Bock and I got into a conversation about this very thing. Many of our younger coworkers never really used command-line tools, and didn’t understand how they could possibly offer more productivity than the elaborate IDEs of today. As David recounts in the foreword to this book, we chatted about this and decided to write a book about using the command line more effectively. We contacted a publisher, and started gathering all the command-line voodoo we could find from friends and coworkers.

Then, several things happened. David started his own consulting company, and he and his wife had their first children: triplets! Well, David now clearly has more on his hands than he can handle. At the same time, I was coming to the conclusion that a book purely about command-line tricks would be perhaps the most boring book ever written. At about that time, I was working on a project in Bangalore, and my pair-programmer partner, Mujir, was talking about code patterns and how to identify them. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been seeing patterns in all the recipes I’d been gathering. Instead of a massive collection of command-line tricks, the conversation should be about identifying what makes developers more productive. That’s what you hold in your hands right now.

Who This Book Is For

This isn’t a book for end users who want to use their computers more effectively. It’s a book about programmer productivity, which means I can make a lot of assumptions about the audience. Developers are the ultimate power users, so I don’t spend a lot of time on basic stuff. A tech-savvy user should certainly learn something (especially in Part I), but the target remains developers.

There is no explicit order to this book, so feel free to wander around as you like or read it front to back. The only connections between the topics appear in unexpected ways, so reading it front to back may have a slight advantage, but not enough to suggest that’s the only way to consume this book.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford. Copyright 2008 Neal Ford, 978-0-596-51978-0.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

This is the only part of the book my non-techy friends will read, so I’d better make it good. My entire life-support system has helped me greatly in this long, drawn-out book process. First, my family, especially my mom Hazel and dad Geary, but also my entire extended family, including my stepmother Sherrie and my stepdad Lloyd. The No Fluff, Just Stuff speakers, attendees, and the organizer Jay Zimmerman have helped me vet this material over many months, and the speakers in particular make the ridiculous amount of travel worthwhile. A special thanks goes to my ThoughtWorks colleagues: a group of people with whom I feel extraordinarily privileged to work. I’ve never before seen a company as committed to revolutionizing the way people write software, with such highly intelligent, passionate, dedicated, selfless people. I attribute at least some of this to the extraordinary Roy Singham, the founder of ThoughtWorks, and upon whom I have a bit of a man-crush, I think. Thanks to all my neighbors (both the non-garage and honorary garage ones), who don’t know or care about any of this technology stuff, especially Kitty Lee, Diane and Jamie Coll, Betty Smith, and all the other current and former Executive Park neighbors (and yes that includes you Margie). Special thanks to my friends that now extend around the globe: Masoud Kamali, Frank Stepan, Sebastian Meyen, and the rest of the S&S crew. And, of course, the guys I see only in other countries, like Michael Li, and, even though they live only five miles away, Terry Dietzler and his wife Stacy, whose schedules far too rarely line up with mine. Thanks (even though they can’t read this) to Isabella, Winston, and Parker, who don’t care about technology but really care about attention (on their terms, of course). A thanks to my friend Chuck, whose increasingly rare visits still manage to lighten my day. And, saving the most important for last, my wonderful wife Candy. All my speaker friends claim that she’s a saint for allowing me to gallivant around the world, speaking about and writing software. She has graciously indulged my all-encompassing career because she knows I love it, but not as much as her. She’s patiently waiting around until I retire or tire of all this, and I can spend all my time with her.

A special thanks goes out to the technical reviewers for this book. Without their hard work and dedication, this book would suffer lots of silly mistakes and confusing explanations. Thanks to Greg Ostravich (who has reviewed every book of mine for the last few years and gotten no recognition, unfortunately), Venkat Subramaniam, David Bock, Nathaniel Schutta, and Matthew McCullough.