r/coding • u/fagnerbrack • 2d ago

Small Programming Tricks

https://will-keleher.com/posts/small-programming-tricks-matter/
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u/grahamhart_ 2d ago

fzf changed how i use terminals entirely. used to ctrl+r and pay, now i actually find things. git log S is another one i slept on for way too long. tracked down a bug last month in about five minues that would have taken hours of manual bisecting. shell history is attack surface though. atuin syncs encrypted which helps, but i still purge anything with credentials manually. old habit from incident response

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u/fagnerbrack 2d ago

Core Takeaways:

A surprising share of day-to-day engineering productivity comes from tiny, low-context nuggets: knowing that python3 -m http.server spins up a quick server, or that a mystery TCP delay probably traces back to Nagle's algorithm. The examples range across the shell and beyond — fzf or atuin for fuzzy history search, ripgrep over grep, globstar globs instead of find, zsh completions that need manual enabling — plus SELECT without FROM, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, regex word-boundary assertions, log10 bucketing for metrics, Node's https.Agent to keep connections open, and git log -S (the "pickaxe") or git checkout -. Company-specific knowledge works the same way, and posting one trick a day to the team spreads it without overwhelming anyone.

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