GrindSmart

When developing, we always tend to search for shortcuts to shorten the amount of time we spend. While some techniques used may harm the quality and integrity of the script you are developing, there are a few that do help you out as a developer without causing damage. We cover five techniques that can be used to cut down on development time.

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Recycling Code

This method or technique rather happens all the time whether knowingly or not. When developing new scripts that may utilize features you have developed before for previous scripts, it is in your best interest to just copy that bit of code and paste it in your ongoing project. This saves you development and puts your retired code back to work.

Auto Complete IDE’s

While integrated development environments enhance your development environment by providing basic syntax error checks and highlighting your syntax, their auto complete feature does speed up development. For example, writing function names, loops, conditional statements, and others can be auto-completed by the IDE.

For a large project, those seconds you save add up to minutes and hours saved. While the whole idea of the auto complete saving time may sound overrated, it is the little things that enhance your development experience that save you time, whether it being the auto complete or even just the line number display.

Frameworks

There are plethoras of frameworks out that take care of a lot of the work for you. For example, many of the scripts you may create may utilize many generic things such as a database connection. Either you can spend time recreating it for your script, or you can download a good framework that completes a lot of the work for you.

If you are not too keen on the idea using frameworks other developers created, you can create your own customized framework, one that suits your needs most of the time. Furthermore, the utilization of prebuilt frameworks can save you hours of development time, therefore, it is something to consider.

Recreating the Obvious

Reinventing the wheel or recreating what is already out there and suffices for your needs wastes development time. If you are developing a forum for yourself or a for a client it is best to use one that has been already created and customize it rather than spend the time create on yourself. However, with that said, if creating one from scratch is easier depending on your situation, or is absolutely necessary, than reinventing the wheel does not quite apply to this point.

Documentation

Documenting your code is a real time saver. Many times when you are developing multiple projects at once, some code snippets get lost and it creates confusion. By documenting your code, going back to pick up from where you left off would be a lot easier as you can read the documentation above a few lines of code to get back into line. Documentation additionally makes debugging easier as you can find the code snippets you are looking for much quicker by reading through your documentation until you reach the appropriate line.

Additionally, if your work is ever transferred to other developers, or other developers transfer their projects to you, you can easily understand the code, what each snippet is doing, and why. Without proper documentation, many of the open source projects today would not be as organized as they are, neither be able to pass the project on to other developers for continued development.

To Conclude

Overall, there many different ways to speed up development, however, it completely depends on your developing style and standards as that determines what techniques best suit you and whom you are developing for.

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