ThePrimeagen Hacks My Productivity

this month I took a developer productivity course from everyone's favorite Vim Enthusiast the primagen the dev environment that the primagen uses fascinates me since it's significantly different from my own as an engineer at Microsoft I've mostly gravitated towards using Microsoft tools Windows vs code Visual Studio GitHub typescript C Etc however it's important to try new things especially when you work in the software industry so I forced myself to use all of the tools mentioned in the course even if I didn't see an immediate benefit first off many of these tools do not offer support for Windows so before trying anything I set up Windows subsystem for Linux or WSL this is a feature that allows me to run a Linux environment on my Windows machine without needing a VM once I had WSL set up I started using t-o the biggest benefit I've seen is not needing multiple terminals open simultaneously even when working on several projects at once for now I'm still using VSS code and visual studio instead of a terminal based text editor so the productivity gains are less significant for me than for a hypothetical Vim or emac user even with this caveat I've still found this tool to be incredibly useful once the key bindings became a habit I found myself able to switch between screens very quickly and efficiently soon I'm planning to challenge myself to only use VM for 30 days I imagine t-x will become even more of a game changer during that time the next tool that made working within the terminal much better was the fuzzy finder especially at my job where sometimes I need to work within repos that are absurdly large being able to search for files and directories at any scope made me understand why some developers never leave their terminal I do wish the key bindings were installed by default since they ended up being the best part of this tool however once you find them in the repo it's not hard to update your shell config another interesting tool from the course is anible which is typically used to set up Linux servers for example if you have 100 virtual machines you can use anible to run a script that will automate the setup for each this information came at a great time since I just ditched my 9-year-old MacBook and built a new computer at the time of watching this course my Dev environment for personal projects had not even been set up so I was excited I spent a few hours putting together an anable script that would install my SSH Keys download all the tools needed and clone all of my repos however I ran into a few problems number one I wasn't comfortable storing my private SSH keys in a public repo even if they are encrypted while the prime agent states in the course that this is generally safe unless Quantum Computing advances past projections a250 is said to be likely Quantum secure so at least for the next while you're going to be safe using this type of encryption it seems pretty good uh and you can store it on public repos there you go it's out there everything's fine it's still safer to have separate SSH keys for each device when you consider that it only takes four commands to generate SSH Keys it's not worth the risk at least not for me number two I just didn't find the time spent writing the script worth the effort to be fair I only have one major personal project which is my Chrome extension so for me it wasn't hard to just install node and enclo in the two repos used for my application I would definitely keep an open mind going forward perhaps if my Dev environment becomes very complicated in the future I'll reconsider using an overall I learned a lot by taking this 4-Hour course although I only adopted a handful of the tools discussed I've gained a much better understanding of the tools that are out there thanks for watching and check out this video on the right of me building a scale from scratch

Channel: Scott Macchia

Views: 28,539

Keywords: theprimeagen, scott macchia, linux, vim, neovim, software, software development, software engineering, frontend masters, tmux, ansible, fzf, bash, ubuntu, wsl, windows subsystem for linux, github, c#, typescript, rust

Id: a3hAqk0uF1g

Length: 3min 29sec (209 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024