sweetgiorni

There are an overwhelming number of tools and techniques that (allegedly) improve productivity. With my limited free time and brain capacity, it can be difficult to gauge whether the returns will be worth the time investment. Some examples that come to mind:

- Learning more advanced Vim techniques, adding new Vim plugins

- Learning more shortcuts for my daily drivers like my IDE(s), shell, etc.

- Adding new shell plugins

- Learning "modern" tools like ripgrep and fzf (There's a list here: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix)

- Anything related to Kubernetes like kubectl-aliases or k9s

What do you find essential? What gives you the most bang for your buck, and conversely, what do you think is overhyped and not worth the time? It doesn't have to be strictly related to productivity; if you found something that makes your job more enjoyable I want to hear about that too!

One thing I wish I picked up earlier is a familiarity with Perl regular expressions and basic Perl syntax. Perl seems to be everywhere and being able to whip up a fancy one-liner with lookarounds and embedded code execution can be incredibly useful. I wouldn't say there's a steep learning curve, but, like most things, the skill atrophies if not exercised regularly.

My current employer creates software that helps large communications companies comply with government regulations. While we technically have "users", we almost never think about them - not because we don't care, but because they simply aren't relevant to our bottom line. If we make something that's clunky and hard to use, it doesn't really matter. As long as we get it done on time and at a lower price than our competitors, we're golden. It may be an oversimplification to say that no one wants our software, but I can guarantee you that if a handful of laws were repealed tomorrow, we wouldn't have a single client. They may need what we make, but they certainly don't want it.

I find myself writing open-source software just to feel the rush of making something cool that people actually find useful. Few things feel better than making software people like. The obvious solution here is to find a new job, but for now, this is where I'm at. I assume I'm not the only one in this situation.

All you user-centered engineers out there: what do you do to keep yourself grounded when writing software that nobody really wants?