watching fan fan function in the
comments of this show people often ask
what editor are you using I’m not going
to talk about my editor today at all or
just to get it out of the way it’s Adam
the theme that I’m using is called
cobalt 2 and it’s made by a fabulous
fellow called Wes boss who you should
follow immediately however you should
not take this as a recommendation of
Adam I really don’t use Adam I just use
some text editor I just pick one at the
time really I don’t really like Adam and
I don’t really hate Adam either when
people recognize that I use Adam from my
videos people ask me what plugins you
use and I use intentionally no plugins
and today’s video is about why that is
why I don’t use any plugins and why I
don’t really care about what text editor
I use gear is the ultimate
procrastination I love this quote
it’s about filmmaking obviously but you
can substitute gear for programming
libraries or development environments or
or at frameworks or whatever and it will
apply to programming perfectly I’m going
to tell your story I want to tell you a
story about me I’m going to tell you a
story a story about a tooling alcoholic
this thing I had we’re not not caring
about what editor I use and what no
plugins I didn’t always be that way I
love tools
I love tools but tools tore how always
distracted me from work I have
programmed a lot of different
programming languages in my day but one
of the first ones that I made a career
on was c-sharp when you’re doing c-sharp
you’re using visual studio.net it’s a
very very powerful AIEE
with lots and lots of features
refactoring tools you basically don’t
have to spend any time working if you
don’t want you can you spend it
completely on learning and mastering
visual studio but if you absolutely
positively want to be in the top level
of time wasters in the world you should
do what I did get resharper resharper is
a fantastically powerful tool made by
JetBrains the people that make IntelliJ
and it basically takes all the features
that are in IntelliJ but missing inside
of Visual Studio and puts them there as
a plugin I was so good at resharper I
knew all the tricks I knew so many
hotkeys I have had this cheat sheet
printed with all the hotkeys so that I
could practice them and we sharper
constantly suggested new language
features to me to teach me like oh you
can refactor this into this and you know
that you could oh this is duplicated
here you could do this and it was oh it
was such a wonderful relationship of me
me and resharper I remember this video
where they had a demo of all the
resharper features where they were
coding it up and uh it was set to the
music of prodigies song voodoo people I
love that song it just if you’re ever if
you if you ever find yourself in the
situation where you have the most
dreadful day and your energy is low you
didn’t get any sleep yesterday but you
need to solve this bug then you just
grab a red book put on drew do people
buy the prodigy and everything will sort
itself out this was a billion years ago
you can actually find the video there
it’s still online and I looked at this
video and I got so um you know buy all
these features and all these cool things
that they did and I I learned the hotkey
for full-member
up in the inheritance hierarchy
and I mean if I get didn’t strike me
back that but it’s just so obvious now
that if you know the hotkey for like
doing a a refactoring of an inheritance
strategy like chances are that you are
probably not spending your time on the
most productive thing that you couldn’t
can do if I back then had read the xkcd
comic is it worth that time it would
have been completely lost on me but back
at the time I thought this was so cool I
also know vim vim is a text editor it’s
a really really pure text editor I
learned them because there are so many
good programmers in my myths that know
them and I also felt that I at that time
I I wanted something simpler I wanted I
des or uh I want to say that IDs are
great but I don’t really think they are
great they are just really cumbersome
things that are in your way and first
and foremost I think that they are slow
like Visual Studio and IntelliJ they
always like give you this spinning
snowball like doing some work and you
don’t really know why they’re doing that
work or how you can get rid of it
they’re just slow to work with but vim
vim is very fast it’s the it’s the
essence of a text editor yes
BAM it starts it feels like you’re
connected you you press a keystroke and
it character appears and you whatever
you do there’s zero fraction there is a
very low latency between your mind the
keyboard and what is happening on screen
the problem with vim is that it’s not a
very good text editor if you don’t spend
a lot of time customizing it out of the
box it doesn’t have a file tree viewer
it doesn’t have a any kind of
autocomplete really it doesn’t have a
doesn’t do your tab indentation
correctly so you need to spend some
serious time setting it up and getting
your be Marcy to the correct state in
getting all the plugins installed and
stuff in addition them is also worthless
if you don’t know what
of hot keys so you need to spend a lot
of time learning them as well moving
your cursor around that requires
knowledge of the hotkeys you need to
remember hotkeys and I also realized
that all this time that I’m spending
with this environment I am getting lost
in this there’s no way that this
investment is gonna pay off in a
Productivity increase there’s just no
way it should be noted that this this
problem might be just me but it might
apply to you if you’re the kind of
person that I am and you are you can
probably tell if you also have the same
problems that I do with to do apps I
have tried so many types of to do
systems I try GTD and I’ve tried
Remember The Milk and I have tried all
the journaling and I have tried having
just a text file I’ve tried so many of
the new to-do apps on product hunt and I
spent so much time maintaining my to-do
systems and tweaking them and so little
to imal actual work at some point I just
realized that I cannot handle to do apps
it’s I’m not allowed I’m not putting to
do apps down or tooling down here I just
saying that they it’s not for me it’s or
like some people can’t handle alcohol I
can’t handle
resharper or to do apps or vim in the
next part of the story I will tell you
about a person that changed how I think
about development forever but before I
don’t judge me
it might be Monday morning for you but I
am recording these on Sundays let me
tell you about you hon at work I met an
insanely productive programmer called
Yohan at this time in my career I was
having some issues with my productivity
I felt like I wasn’t getting as much
done as a developer as I felt like I
wanted I didn’t I wasn’t delivering the
value um that I wanted so I started
looking at other developers around me
who seemed to be really good at being
productive who seemed to be really good
at reliably delivering value for other
people and you one stood out like he was
like I have a lot of really productive
colleagues that are amazing but Johan
was just he seemed to be always ahead of
everybody else in this department so he
started asking him questions about who
he is and what he does and how he works
and how he lives his life basically you
wanders a lot of the things that are
common knowledge right you know like he
he eats healthy he gets up early in the
morning and exercises but a lot of
people do those things and they don’t
stand out in the way that Joanne does in
productivity wise and it wasn’t until
one day when he just offhandedly
mentioned during a discussion about
tooling that uh yeah I don’t use any
hotkeys and I was is what and he said no
I don’t I don’t know any I know one in
IntelliJ you know that shift shift to
search everywhere but that’s the only
one I use and then a lot of things
regarding you one fell into place for me
because another thing that I had noticed
with Joanne was that he is very meeting
hostile I don’t mean that he’s hostile
during meetings he’s like nicest guy
ever no he’s a very skeptical about the
purpose of a meeting so he often asks
like do we really need to have a meeting
about this do we need to spend time
sitting around discussing this can we
have decided or
is this meeting too long the lesson that
I draw from John is that he was very
careful about not doing too much meta
work what do I mean by meta work there
are two kinds of work there’s work where
you make actual progress on you know
bugs or features that are meaningful to
the user basically you’re doing things
that the end user will appreciate that
is work but then there’s also meta work
metal work is stuff that you do in order
to indirectly make the work more
efficient or better directed stuff like
meetings planning stand-up refactoring
learning new language features moving
libraries to new version style guides
code review even my holy cow the unit
tests that’s meta work meta work meta
meta meta a bit about meta meta work is
necessary if you have a super
inefficient process or if you don’t know
what you’re doing it doesn’t really
matter how much time you put into work
but it is very very easy at least for me
to fall into the trap of using meta work
as a type of procrastination you can in
practice spend all of your time doing
mater work and one way to make sure that
that doesn’t happen is to be skeptical
and use as few tools as possible I
joined it where he only knew one single
hotkey in summary I love tools but tools
have always distracted me so I try to
use as few tools as possible
I am mvj and this is like at the Twitter
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one as a youtuber besides red wine I
also feed off comments
what’s this episode something that you
recognize yourself in or do you have no
problems with this at all and what does
your tooling look like share it down
below for the benefit of me and your
fellow viewers until next Monday morning stay curious