I shipped a minor change this morning that was just 10 lines of code, but it required me to navigate through a bunch of tools: issue tracker, editor, Git host, continuous integration, deployment panel, logs, Slack, and finally the dashboard. That's a total of seven tools just for one trivial feature! I'm curious, how many tools do you typically interact with when making a small change? Streamlining this process is something I'm really focused on right now.
4 Answers
For me, it involves a lot of terminal commands. Here’s my flow: Terminal for the issue tracker, another terminal for the Gitea CLI, lazygit, neovim with Obsidian—then Unity and Rider, and a few more terminal tricks for profiling and building. I keep everything in terminal sessions. Pretty streamlined, right? Though I definitely face that cognitive overload from switching contexts!
Only seven? That’s low! My last quick fix involved hitting up: Slack, Jira, GitHub, VSCode, terminal, Docker, then back to GitHub, and using Actions, ArgoCD, and Datadog. I ended up using twelve tools since I had to update Jira twice to close it. Each one adds up in terms of focus and time.
I keep it simple—I use a script! Just a quick command in the terminal: './commit.sh "issue #blah" --deploy'. It automates everything else, and DigitalOcean takes care of deploying a fresh instance without leaving any unwanted orphans behind.
I used just two tools: PulsarEdit and WinSCP. Job done, quick and efficient!
Yeah, I feel you there. I struggle with context switching daily too. It really takes a toll on focus!