Behind the Scenes

Productivity Recipes of a Web Developer

3 Comment(s) | published by Bobkov A. on Friday, July 16, 2010

In this post I want to share my recipes that helped me to keep productive during the month and years I've been developing web applications. I have been developing web applications for more than 12 years and LemonStand has taken about 1 and a half years of this time. It is easy to get bored and loose concentration when working on something for such a long period of time. Of course, your positive feedback helps a lot, but there are also some simple methods of staying productive I learned during my experiences.

Be self-inspiring

Being self-inspiring means doing things in such a way that they inspire you and give you energy to carry on. I believe that each person has their own understanding of inspiration. As for me, the following things work the best.

When I'm developing a new feature I always draw a nice, detailed user interface in Photoshop before implementing it. It gives me the opportunity to have a rest from coding and switch to another type of activity. And when I return to coding I already have a detailed user interface mockup which inspires me to keep coding.

Write code properly. This is not only about how the code works and how graceful is it (this is a concern of any developer!), but also about code formatting. Everything should be in its right place and every line should be beautiful.

Everything should be in its right place and every line should be beautiful.

So, no tab/space mix for indentation, no triple line breaks, no ugly comments. A single block of poorly formatted or not properly thought out code can spoil everything that you write after it. If you allowed yourself to write bad code somewhere, you may begin thinking "OK, if it worked there, I don't need to care much about it here either". So, I'm always trying to be disciplined and to not allow myself many liberties when it comes to code quality. It helps me to keep the inspired feeling of knowing my work is high-end and squeaky clean at all times.

Keep the workspace clean

Any foreign objects in your working environment can kill productivity. Lose the dirty mugs, no heaps of papers and no other stuff which you don't need right now. I keep my desk as clean as possible, and it helps my thoughts to be clean and concentrated. To work I only need my old Mac Mini, a notebook and a pencil.

Use simple and inspiring tools

Today there are plenty of tools which can inspire you. Do not use a code editor which has an ugly user interface. Do not use any tools with ugly UI at all! I use TextMate for coding, because it has a simple interface and it is not bloated with features that stick out of every corner. I use Versions for managing my Subversion local copies. And I use a Mac, because it is both simple and inspiring. Each of these tools has many alternatives, but I chose them, because I'm the most productive with them.

Switch the activity type

Although there are people who think differently, switching the activity type during the day helps me stay efficient. When you do a specific type of work for many hours at a run you may begin losing the ability to think critically. I learned this through experience. During the day I usually change my activity type several times between customers support, coding, designing and physical exercise.

These methods have helped me be productive over the years and develop great products.

Are there recipes which help you? Please share them with us by leaving a comment below!