Simple tricks that can speed up your development cycle

I recently watched Bret Victor's video - Inventing on Principle. That is so inspired. The demos are awesome in their own right. He talked about his principle: Creators need an immediate connection to what they create.

Inspired by that, I start thinking about how to speed up my development feedback. Here is a little trick that I think is useful to me.

Introduce two core tools

ag: The Silver Searcher. Like ack, but faster.
entr: Run arbitrary commands when files change.

Save code, See the result

Web sample

When any html/css/js files change, the current chrome page will refresh.

ag -l --html --css --js | entr ./reload-browser.sh chrome

You can download reload-browser.sh from here.

Golang sample

When any go files change, my custom run script will be executed. I can build, start, run tests on my project automatically.

ag -l --go | entr -c -r ./run.sh