How I’m a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly
How I’m a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly
Having all API docs one key press away is profoundly empowering.
The author talks about the transformative experience of using a native API Documentation browser when doing development work. While its true that documentation is accessible from the web, the experience of keeping a dozen tabs open at all times in order to reference them is jarring and has a high overhead.
The application the author highlights is Dash, a native mac app that allows users to pull up docs in a single keystroke and find the relevant docs in seconds. On the surface, this does not seem that different from searching on google, but the difference of a single keystroke (vs searching and clicking) and single digit seconds to find the results (vs multi digit seconds) is the difference between overwhelming to enpowering.
In chemistry, activation energy is defined as
the minimum quantity of energy which the reacting species must possess in order to undergo a specified reaction
Source: Oxford Languages
The quantity matters - the difference between the reaction taking place and not can be a single milliliter of solvent. There is a similar analogy to be made for knowledge management and accessing information that is on the internet vs accessing something that you have available locally.
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