Creating time - The dev superpower you didn't know you had

Let's be honest, time is the top asset in the world. ⌛ But as developers, we work for money... and...

Money is unlimited - kind of. 🤑 If anyone is familiar with what has been happening in the last 6 months with the fed printing money - you probably also realized this. It's a pity to work for the thing that some people can create with the press of a button.

But what if your work could create time? ⏱️

Coding can create time 💡

Programming might be one of the top-paying industries because it saves people time. Imagine the world without:

• Search engines - how much time would it take to find information?
• Online stores - how much time it took to buy things if you could only do it offline?
• Social networks - how much time would it take to share something, and how would you accomplish that?
• Autonomous cars - how much time people will get back because of fully autonomous driving?

Even if you think you aren't working on things at scale - you are investing your time and energy in building things that should somehow save other people's time.

If you enjoyed this article chances are you will also enjoy what I post on Twitter.

Comments

[Alexandru-Dan Pop]

You should always optimize time, through any of:

• making sure you code for a purpose - the product you are building needs to reduce times spent in other areas/industries
• optimize for speed of change & change things based on feedback
• build systems & feedback looks
• make changes based on what makes you more productive Ex: you thought building a microservice-based app requires one repo for each service - well now when you build something you switch branches in X repos - change it to a monorepo & save time
• drop useless meetings - did we just waste X people's time for something that could have been an email or a wiki page? Nice, now let's make sure we don't do it again.
• improve DX - people will do their best work in a workspace where they can shine
• use tools that can catch bugs ahead of time (typed languages, automated tests)
• reduce compilation time (raise your hand if you worked at a company where it took more than 5 minutes to compile the code ✋)