Tooling<p>When your text editor is not enough for a task, and it hopefully is extensible, consider writing little plugins to reduce repetitive tasks.<p>Here is an example. I was working with a legacy code base using an infamous Scala actor framework. Basically, all function calls were replaced by message passing. All messages were sent as 'Any' objects, then downcast to the expected type, so an IDE wasn't of much use. I wrote a little bash script to populate a jump buffer in vim with the result of a grep, and suddenly, I had jump functionality! Originally, I had to jump to type definition, hope that the associated "received message" type was in the same file, then look for downcasting into that received type. I don't remember precisely the details, but what I do remember is that the little script helped go from a few seconds to just pressing two keys to navigate the code. It's especially useful for legacy code, where the main activity associated with it is reading and understanding.<p>Our capacity to focus as humans is limited in time and energy. Writing tools to do in half a second what otherwise would take a few seconds can help, not only to make you faster (for that, refer to xkcd 1205) but also to effectively increase your capacity to focus.<p>Though being able to develop your own tooling is less important today. Languages and frameworks nowadays prioritize tooling as an important feature. And I'm grateful for that, programming used to be much more annoying.