Simon Willison - Productivity

Simon Willison's Talk on Productivity

Commits should contain:
- Implementation (a single change)
- Documentation
- Unit tests
- Link to an issue thread
Always write over-verbose issue threads
- To help you track decisions made
- To document false starts and possible approaches
- To document the reason for the change
- To store stackoverflow links or other useful external info
- Code snippets
- Screenshots (animated where appropriate)
- Link to updated docs and demo upon close
Issue trackers are temporal - unlike documentation, it cannot get out of date and does not need to be maintained
"Issue driven development"
Means you don't have to keep track of anything
"Treat the project like it will be maintained by someone else"
Helps you get back to what you were doing much quicker
Issue trackers are equivalent to lab notebooks
If you do something, you have to tell people what you did
Avoid side projects with user accounts
- If it has user accounts, it's not a side-project, it's an unpaid job