Working Efficiently

Making effective use of one's time and energy is especially important for computer programming in which:

1. the use of technology introduces increased complexity for some tasks, and
2. many tasks often include some degree of repetition.

By adopting strategies that decrease time lost to inefficiency, you'll have more time to spend on more important things: hanging out with your friends, watching movies, and programming. ;)

You should do these things:

• Set your file system to display in list or column view rather than icon view.
  You're going to be spending a lot of time navigating your filesystem. Nested folders are more easily located when you can see the directory structure.
• Increase your "key repeat" rate.
  This will change your life as a coder. Try it and see!
• Keep a daily backup of your computer.
  It's easy to do. All it requires is an external hard drive that you plug in to your laptop each night, or a $5/month subscription to a backup service. Set it up now. Providing evidence of your backup strategy will be one of the first assignments in this course. Having backups will save you time and trouble when you lose your data—and you will lose your data. I personally guarantee it.
• Sleep your computer instead of shutting it down.
  Restarting your computer once in awhile isn't a bad idea, but laptops are perfectly good at sleeping, going into a low-power mode, and waking in a fraction of the time that it takes them to do a cold boot. When you come into class, you'll typically want to be able to pull your machine out of your bag, open it up, and get working right away.
• Keep your computer charged.
  Charging your computer while you're working in class is certainly possible, but it's not ideal. Get in the habit of charging your computer overnight so that you can come to school the next day with a full charge. And if you don't think you can make it through the day without a recharge, make sure you bring your power brick, gently wrapped so that the cables aren't stretched or bent.
• Open two windows for coding.
  Whether you're working in a Terminal/text editor or running an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), you'll typically want to have two windows open side by side on your screen. The one on the left is typically for writing code, while the one on the right is for running that code and looking at output, error messages, etc. You want to spend almost no time clicking around to see what's happening in different windows. You should be able to glance back and forth from one window to another to make the best use of your time.

• Use the keyboard rather than the mouse.
  Your fingers spend most of their time on the keyboard, so the less you have to reach for a mouse or the trackpad, the better off you'll be. Whatever your operating system, identify the keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to quickly launch an application, switch to a different application, or jump to a new window. You'll save an enormous amount of time.