This post appeared first on Substack.
I’m starting an essentialist blog to share quick productivity tips, inspiring reads, and useful tools. Today, I cover tools to finally get your tasks done and GenAI in software engineering.
I haven’t sent a newsletter in a while. Why? I kept postponing it due to other priorities and uncertainty about how to set it up. If I commit to it, I want to stick with it – while making sure it’s truly valuable to you, as value your attention.
Inspired by Tim Ferriss’ and Alan Frei’s minimalist, plaintext blog that covers short inspirational reads, tools and ideas, I am finally starting mine. And no, I won’t write the newsletter with ChatGPT, promise! Also, if you have feedback on the format, feel free to email me at andre@flowlabs.com. Thanks for being here!
🚀 Productivity Hack
Did you know that in Microsoft Teams lets you schedule messages?
If you have a quick, non-urgent question for a colleague, you can schedule it instead of interrupting them. It helps you clear your plate while reducing stress for others, especially in the evenings and on weekends.
📖 Reads
- In a recent Forbes article, our long-term collaborator Lauren Howe shared three interventions for more productive teams: signal availability to reduce interruptions, shift mindsets around supporting productivity, and use reflection to drive continuous small improvements.
- The DORA State of AI-assisted software development report, based on 100+ hours of interviews and ~5,000 survey responses, shows GenAI amplifies strengths of high-performing teams. But it can worsen dysfunction in struggling ones. Good workflows, practices, policies and trainings amplify positive impact of GenAI use.
- Claude Code from Anthropic is a terminal-based GAI coding assistant that has launched just 5 months ago and has generated $500M ARR. This article by The Pragmatic Engineer talks about the tech stack (TypeScript, React) how it was dogfooded during the development (AI-first development), and more.
🏗️ Tools
- AIRbar (free for Windows and macOS) is a lightweight task‐management tool designed to help you stay focused on what truly matters by embedding three practices into your day: intention, awareneness & retrospection. We developed and evaluated it in a research project.
- Focus Friend (freemium for iOS and Android) is a gamified focus timer app. While the focus bean is happily knitting away, your job is to focus on your work, without constantly distracting yourself with your phone. Get your attention back in a fun way, built by Hank Green.
- OpenAI Prompt Optimizer (free) automatically refines prompts to follow their own prompting guide. This can be especially useful for prompts that you use repeatedly, or use in your own programs. Here is a quick demo.
😅 Meme
In an unexpectedly, semi-viral LinkedIn post last week (almost 600 likes, ~250K impressions at time of writing), we’ve had great discussions triggered by the meme below. We talked about how to leverage GenAI in simple/new projects (easy) and in complex/large projects (hard). The latter ones, evolved around sharing best-practices, integrating it well into existing workflows of the SDLC and keeping the human in the loop.
🔎 FlowLabs Update
A week ago, our seminar on Software Developer Experience started at the University of Zurich.
We’ve run a dozen workshops on developer experience, productivity and well-being with four more just confirmed for November! 71% of participants reported instant productivity gains, 65% felt more in control of their workday afterwards and 68% stated that the workshop helped to get into focus when it matters. Until the end of the year, our workshops are 50% off, contact us in case of interest.
Also, we’ve started running an interview study on the state of developer experience in practice, where together with leading researchers in the field, we want to better understand organizations’ motivation for, measures, impact and challenges with implementing DX initiatives. Let us know in case you’re interested in participating.
Comments are closed.