Ford - The Productive Programmer

Copyright 2009 Neal Ford

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Many years ago, I taught training classes for experienced developers who were learning new technologies (like Java). The disparity between the productivity of the students always struck me: some were orders of magnitude more effective. And I dont mean in the tool they were using: I mean in their general interaction with the computer. I used to make a joke to a few of my colleagues that some of the people in the class werent running their computers, they were walking them. Following a logical conclusion, that made me question my own productivity. Am I getting the most efficient use out of the computer Im running (or walking)?

Fast-forward years later, and David Bock and I got into a conversation about this very thing. Many of our younger coworkers never really used command-line tools, and didnt understand how they could possibly offer more productivity than the elaborate IDEs of today. As David recounts in the foreword to this book, we chatted about this and decided to write a book about using the command line more effectively. We contacted a publisher, and started gathering all the command-line voodoo we could find from friends and coworkers.

Then, several things happened. David started his own consulting company, and he and his wife had their first children: triplets! Well, David now clearly has more on his hands than he can handle. At the same time, I was coming to the conclusion that a book purely about command-line tricks would be perhaps the most boring book ever written. At about that time, I was working on a project in Bangalore, and my pair-programmer partner, Mujir, was talking about code patterns and how to identify them. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been seeing patterns in all the recipes Id been gathering. Instead of a massive collection of command-line tricks, the conversation should be about identifying what makes developers more productive. Thats what you hold in your hands right now.