Small programming tricks that quietly boost productivity
Original: Small programming tricks
Why This Matters
Onboarding speed and team productivity often hinge on exactly this kind of tacit, shareable know-how.
Developer Will Keleher argues that small, discrete pieces of technical knowledge — shell history tricks, SQL shortcuts, git commands — deliver outsized productivity gains without requiring deep background expertise. He lists roughly a dozen concrete examples spanning terminal tools, regex, JavaScript, and git.
Keleher's post makes a simple but underappreciated point: a lot of day-to-day engineering speed comes from isolated nuggets of knowledge rather than deep mastery. You don't need to know Python to run `python3 -m http.server`. You don't need to understand Nagle's algorithm in depth — just knowing it exists can save an hour of debugging a mysterious TCP delay.
His examples are practical and varied. On the terminal side: `fzf` turns `ctrl+r` into a fuzzy history search; `atuin` replaces shell history with a SQLite database; `per-directory-history` scopes searches by working directory. For SQL: `SELECT` without `FROM` is a quick way to test functions or check how `NULL` comparisons behave; `EXPLAIN ANALYZE` in PostgreSQL and MySQL actually runs the query and returns detailed performance data.
For git users, `git log -S` (the 'pickaxe') finds every commit that added or removed a specific string — particularly valuable in legacy codebases. `git checkout -` mirrors the shell's `cd -` to return to the previous HEAD. On the JavaScript side, he flags `Array.flatMap`, `Object.entries`, `Promise.withResolvers`, and the `https.Agent` pattern in Node.js for persistent connections, which can sharply cut latency.
He closes by noting that institutional knowledge at companies follows the same pattern: knowing who to ask, where the docs live, and what a specific alert means is itself a form of high-leverage, low-infrastructure knowledge.