Productivity Hacks. Engineers love nothing more than… | by Jocelyn Goldfein | jocelyngoldfein

Engineers love nothing more than hacking on our own productivity. At its worst, it becomes its own form of procrastination (hence the term “yak shaving”) but at its finest, it allows us to tackle ever-larger and more complicated problems and streamlines our entrance to the exalted state of flow. I learned the lesson early. As Netscape’s first summer intern in 1995, I’d broken the build once, survived the wrath of jwz, and never made that mistake again. I returned for a second internship in the summer of 1996 to find a company transformed by growth. With new hires and interns pouring in every week, the build was broken almost every day. In 1995 there had been a grand total of thirty engineers working on the browser, across Windows, Unix, and Mac. In 1996… well, no one was really sure — but there were three hundred people on the clienteng mailing list. The legendary Terry Weissman was working on the flagship new feature for Netscape 3.0: e-mail. Progress was glacial thanks to the constan

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• Sherry Xie