How to Be a Fast Programmer

Being a fast programmer isn't any one thing. Certainly, raw intuition and talent play its part, but being a fast programmer isn't something that just happens. You need to review your habits and find out where you are spending your time while programming.

Waiting for the computer.

Eliminating a few seconds delay here and there hardly seems worth upgrading your computer. However, humans are not machines which just chug at things until they're finished. We get distracted. Distractions pull us out of our mental zone of maximum productivity. If you ever say "they're in the zone", your next move would probably not be to go and distract that person.

Computers can never be fast enough. If your IDE does something which delays you for a few seconds while it looks something up, that's a problem.

Entering code.

Slow code-run-debug cycles.

If your cycle of code-compile-run-finderror-code-compile-run-finderror cycle is delayed by a minute every time you're compiling and running, that's a shit ton of time when you are doing lots of quick fixes.

Over thinking initial design.

I'll figure out the right way later on. (aka. mental cancer)

You know that situation where you are writing code and you know you're duplicating effort or wasting time doing things the known way, but you just need to get it done now, so you just put off optimizing your process until later? You have failed. You will never be a fast programmer if you always think like that.

You need to stop and take the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts. You need to learn the proper ways to use photoshop. You need to learn to use the tools which will help you be faster later.

You need to allocate some time at some point to work on that and the time to allocate is often right now. Right fucking now! Procrastination isn't just the act of putting off work. It's also the act of putting off work flow optimizations until the day after never.

If you're repeating a lot of actions over and over then try to replace those actions with a script or a plugin or a new tool.