When I was young and has just started to learn programming, I read some descriptions of what programming was like as a job. These fell roughly into one of two categories:

• long meetings, and writing a lot of documentation
• long days of furious hacking fuelled by chemicals

That was decades ago. I have since learn from experience that a programmer's productivity is best boosted by:

• knowing clearly what to do
  • a well-defined goal is easier to reach than one that is unclear or changes all the time
• knowing one's tools and being comfortable with them
  • the exploration phase of using a new tool is rarely very productive
• not being interrupted while doing it
  • being in the flow is commonly preferred, but may or may not be necessary; however, frequent interruptions are anti-productive in any case
• getting enough sleep
  • continuous yawning is distracting, concentration is difficult if your brain is hallucinating from lack of sleep
• avoidance of bad stress
  • stress that makes you worry about the future is bad
• having a reliable source of lapsang tea
  • but I need to stop drinking it at least six hours before bedtime, or I sleep badly
• a comfortable work environment
  • see our previous article

It further helps to use various tools that allow the programmer concentrate on cranking out the code:

• automated language checkers
  • statically types languages require you to get types right, and will catch you if you mistype a variable name
  • static checkers for dynamically typed languages can often do the same job
  • either way, they help you catch errors earlier, which means you spend less time waiting for an error to happen
• automated tests
  • unit tests, integration tests, etc, allow you to avoid spending time and effort on doing the same tests manually over and over
• reuse of high-quality code
  • this means libraries, code generators, tools you can run, etc
  • these save you time by not having to write the code yourself
  • they further save time by not having to debug the code you wrote
  • however, beware of low-quality code; it won't save you time, since you'll almost certainly have to debug and fix it yourself
• automated systems to run your automated tests
  • continuous integration runs without you having to remember to run your tests
  • it also runs them in the background, meaning you don't need to wait for them to finish, which is especially useful when you have slow tests
  • the tests also get run in a well-defined environment, rather than the developer's randomly configured ever-changing laptop
• automated system for installing software on target machines
  • continuous delivery takes care of installing your software somewhere you can use it, which may or may not be the production server
  • this is especially useful for server, web, and command line software, but is generally useful
  • often the process of installing manually is tedious - just like doing manual testing - so the more it's automated the less time you waste on repetitive work