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While many boot camps and guides focus on teaching you how to build a web application, one of the challenges of software development is time. You only have so many hours in the day and want to hit that deadline. After doing web development for several years I have adopted sixteen proven ways to speed up my workflow.

Lately at work I have been writing a lot of JavaScript. As a consequence I have also been reading lots of JavaScript examples and documentation. JavaScript is a highly useful language that also happens to not look so great. However it has improved in recent years. The introduction of arrow functions has increased the readability of JavaScript code, which is often polluted with nested function calls. Along with the introduction of promises, async/await, and string interpolation using backticks, modern JavaScript code is now more readable and easier to reason about than ever.

Yesterday I learned that GMail, Google’s e-mail product, was spam boxing replies to e-mails that I have sent to other people. As a software developer I find this behavior strange. If I was designing a spam filter I would assume that e-mail replies that have knowledge of that e-mail were not spam. That is an easy conditional to test for. Yet the evidence suggests that Google’s sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms do not do this. Their support simply said to check my filters and mark the replies as not spam. They did not even offer to send a towel to wipe the egg I got on my face from thinking folks were not responding to my queries.

When I first learned what we call web software development I was in middle school. I remember going to Barnes & Noble with my parents where I picked up a book called HTML Goodies by Joe Burns. HTML was magical. It took little effort to write a few lines of code that changes the presentation of your text on the screen. As I hit the limit of what I could do with HTML the arrival of Javascript let me sprinkle some magic into the site. A little learning lead to lots of magic.

Yesterday I was looking for an easy way to take a bunch of data and geocode it. In the past I used to either write a basic Ruby script to manipulate a CSV (which is not hard but more tedious than my late afternoon brain enjoys). I remembered I used to use Google Fusion tables to do this sort of thing and after some searching I learned you can now write Javascript functions for your Google spreadsheet. Now instead of writing a full script I could write a four line function that accepted the address from another cell as an argument and return a latitude or longitude. I can imagine this feature being not only useful for me, but my colleagues as well.