It seems like there’s a recurring topic going on here: I’m very picky about how much stuff (and what stuff exactly) I see in my work area! (See list of posts related to that down below).
Several years ago I was trying out different DAW software (Digital Audio Workstation) to record my music. I’ve tried at least half a dozen of them. I’m NOT a recording engineer; all I wanted was something where I could press a big red button so I could start play my instruments and have it recorded.
Most DAWs I found failed that simple requirement as I was presented with extremelly convoluted user interfaces in which I simply could not figure out how I could plug my guitar and start recording it. I’m both a software developer and a musician, and still, I couldn’t figure out how to do this one simple thing!!
Such user interfaces made me feel stupid and I want to deal with them. I eventually found this one DAW that satisfied my needs as a hobbyist musician.
Simplicity is key for productivity, and that applies to setting up the development tools we work with, as well as the code we write. Polluted tools get in the way of reading code. Convoluted code gets in the way of understanding what it does.
Clean up your development environtment! Clean up your code! Clean it up!! 🙂
Some of my posts related to my take on optimizing what I see on my screen as a developer:
- Writing code is cheap. Understanding it, not so much.
- Toggling Visual Studio CodeLens On/Off
- SpecFlow: My preference for the step definition style
- The “private” keyword in C#: I get rid of it!
- Fun with C#: Cleaning up dense code with Dictionary and ForEach
- Fun with C#: Object and Collection initializers
Claudio Lassala's Blog 