productivity

Fire and Motion

Joel Spolsky wrote “Fire and Motion” blog post back in 2002, but it is as relevant today as it was 15 years ago. It’s a good read on the subject of both personal and organizational productivity.

What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I’ve always been one of the most productive members of the team. That’s probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won’t reduce a team’s output.

git add –patch and –interactive

I knew about git interactive staging for a while now, but I’ve never really used it. Most days I work on a single feature or bug fix at a time and can commit sequentially, one change after another. For an occasional mess, I found git interactive staging user interface too be too cumbersome.

The last couple of days at work were quite chaotic, with me jumping from one thing to another, and I decided to master that feature once and for all. Looking for a better tutorial, I came across this blog post, which covers the interactive staging, but also provides a much simpler approach – “git add –patch“.

It’ll take some practice to get it into my finger memory, but I think I’m settled now.

Building the Right Alerting System

Here’s something I wanted to get into for a while now, but haven’t had the time yet – switching the monitoring / alerting system from server-oriented to business-oriented. The gist of the story is:

If it’s not actionable and business critical, then it shouldn’t ring.

The article has some statistics and summaries as well. The reasoning behind the switch is obvious, but it’s good to have it formulated:

After a few months, I can tell reducing our alerting rate should have been a top priority before things got out of hands, for a few reasons.

Constant alerts prevented the team to focus on what was important. Being interrupted even for things that can wait for a few hours lowers our productivity when we work on things that can’t wait.

Being awaken every night, several times a night exhausts a team and make people less productive at day, and more prone to do errors.

Too many off hours interventions cost the company a lot of money that could be invested in hardening the infrastructure or hiring someone else instead.

Is group chat making you sweat?

Jason Fried has an excellent write-up on the pros and cons of using group chat for the team communications, and some of the ways to make it better. We use HipChat in the company and while it’s vital to our operations and I can’t even begin to think how we could do what we do without it, it does have some negative side effects – exactly as James describes them.

The most valuable advice out of that long article is this one (I’ve heard it before a few times, but it’s worth repeating):

Think about it like sleep. If someone was interrupted every 15 minutes while they were trying to sleep, you wouldn’t think they’d be getting a good night’s sleep. So how can getting interrupted all day long lead to a good day’s work?

Programmer Interrupted

Slashdot runs a thread on “Are Remote Software Teams More Productive?“. The original post links to a few research references that, unsurprisingly, show how expensive interruptions are to programmers, and how unprepared we are, as an industry, to deal with this problem. I particularly liked a rather in-depth look at the issue in “Programmer Interrupted” article.

Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches.

Here are a few points, if the article is too long for you to handle:

Based on a analysis of 10,000 programming sessions recorded from 86 programmers using Eclipse and Visual Studio and a survey of 414 programmers (Parnin:10), we found:

A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption.

When interrupted during an edit of a method, only 10% of times did a programmer resume work in less than a minute.

A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day

And also this bit on the worst time to interrupt a programmer:

If an interrupted person is allowed to suspend their working state or reach a “good breakpoint”, then the impact of the interruption can be reduced (Trafton:03). However, programmers often need at least 7 minutes before they transition from a high memory state to low memory state (Iqbal:07). An experiment evaluating which state a programmer less desired an interruption found these states to be especially problematic (Fogarty:05):

During an edit, especially with concurrent edits in multiple locations.

Navigation and search activities.

Comprehending data flow and control flow in code.

IDE window is out of focus.

Overall, not surprising at all, but it’s nice to have some numbers and research papers to point to…